There was heavy rain when he reached the streets. The people were coming out of the theaters and halls, scurrying along under umbrellas, darting for cover, wrestling their way into cabs and omnibuses and Tube stations. The streets were like black mirrors, or deep sluggish rivers, with the lights drowned in them. The people were all hurrying to get out of the rain. Old Mole was indifferent to it, and more acutely than ever was he visited by the sense of having nothing in common with them. By sheer force of numbers they presented themselves to his mind as obscene. At one point he was caught in a crowd and so offended by the smell of warm flesh, wet clothes and heated india rubber that he was for a moment possessed by a desire to strike the nearest man. He restrained himself and walked on. In front of him there were a brace of marketable women profiting by the weather to display their legs up to their knees. His mind raced back to the Puritanism in which he had been nurtured, and he was filled with the Antonine heated horror of women. . . . All the way home he was beset with sights and scenes that accentuated his disgust.
It was not until he reached Gray's Inn that he was faced with the pathetic absurdity of his situation, and then he found it unthinkable. There was not an object in the chambers but cried aloud of Matilda. She had made the place beautiful, changed its tone from masculine to feminine, and she was there though she was absent. It was very grim and horrible; like coming on the clothes of a beloved creature of whose death he had been told. He played with the idea of death voluptuously. She was dead, he told himself; his own end was not far off. The shadow of it was over the place. He went from room to room, fingering her possessions, touching the stuffs and garments he had last seen in her hands. He opened her wardrobe and thrust his hands among her soft gowns. He stood by her bed and patted the pillow and smoothed the coverlet. He caught sight of himself in her mirror and told himself that he could see her face, too. And she was very young, too young to be dead: and he was startlingly, haggardly old. Surely the end could not be far off.
He went from room to room, picturing her in each as he had last seen her.