Page:The Trespasser, Lawrence, 1912.djvu/220

212 grasses placed where he would not have allowed it—on his piano; nor his fiddle, laid cruelly on the cold, polished floor near the window. He merely sat down in an armchair, and felt sick.

All his unnatural excitement, all the poetic stimulation of the past few days, had vanished. He sat flaccid, while his life struggled slowly through him. After an intoxication of passion and love, and beauty, and of sunshine, he was prostrate. Like a plant that blossoms gorgeously and madly, he had wasted the tissue of his strength, so that now his life struggled in a clogged and broken channel.

Siegmund sat with his head between his hands, leaning upon the table. He would have been stupidly quiescent in his feeling of loathing and sickness had not an intense irritability in all his nerves tormented him into consciousness.

“I suppose this is the result of the sun—a sort of sunstroke,” he said, realizing an intolerable stiffness of his brain, a stunned condition in his head.

“This is hideous!” he said. His arms were quivering with intense irritation. He exerted all his will to stop them, and then the hot irritability commenced in his belly. Siegmund fidgeted in his chair without changing his position. He had not the energy to get up and move about. He fidgeted like an insect pinned down.

The door opened. He felt violently startled; yet there was no movement perceptible. Vera entered, ostensibly for an autograph album into which she was going to copy a drawing from the London Opinion, really to see what her father was doing. He did not move a muscle. He only longed intensely for his