“You’re right, Mary,” he said, with something of an effort, “though I don’t know how you guessed it.”
She was silent, hoping that he might tell her the reason of his unhappiness, for his excuses had not deceived her.
“I was unhappy—very unhappy,” he repeated. Some six weeks separated him from that afternoon when he had sat upon the Embankment watching his visions dissolve in mist as the waters swam past and the sense of his desolation still made him shiver. He had not recovered in the least from that depression. Here was an opportunity for making himself face it, as he felt that he ought to; for, by this time, no doubt, it was only a sentimental ghost, better exorcised by ruthless exposure to such an eye as Mary’s, than allowed to underlie all his actions and thoughts as had been the case ever since he first saw Katharine Hilbery pouring out tea. He must begin, however, by mentioning her name, and this he found it impossible to do. He persuaded himself that he could make an honest statement without speaking her name; he persuaded himself that his feeling had very little to do with her.
“Unhappiness is a state of mind,” he said, “by which I mean that it is not necessarily the result of any particular cause.”
This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it became more and more obvious to him that, whatever he might say, his unhappiness had been directly caused by Katharine.
“I began to find my life unsatisfactory,” he started afresh. “It seemed to me meaningless.” He paused again, but felt that this, at any rate, was true, and that on these lines he could go on.
“All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office, what’s it FOR? When one’s a boy, you see, one’s head is so full of dreams that it doesn’t seem to matter what one does. And if you’re ambitious, you’re all right; you’ve got a reason for going on. Now my reasons ceased to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That’s very likely now I come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything, though?) Still, it’s impossible, after a certain age, to take oneself in satisfactorily. And I know what carried me on”—for a good reason now occurred to him—“I wanted to be the savior of my family and all that kind of thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a lie, of course—a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most people, I suppose, I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I’m at the awkward stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with. That’s what my unhappiness amounts to, Mary.”