Page:Twilight of the Souls (1917).djvu/347

Rh dimmer and dimmer around them, until it became unillumined dusk: the dusk of age; the dusk of sorrow; the dusk of cynical selfishness; the dusk of life without living; all the heavy, sombre twilight that gathered around small souls. . . until with Ernst the dusk had grown into night and the dark dream from which he was now emerging. . . . They called that recovering. . . . They thought that he would recover. . . . Oh, how dark and gloomy were the shadows of the twilight and how heavy was the fate that hung over their small souls, hung over them like a leaden sky, an immensity of leaden skies! . ..

He, yes, he would get better. It might take months yet; and then he would resume his service as a dull, decrepit old man, diseased through and through, from his childhood, under the semblance of muscular strength, until one serious illness was enough to break him and make him dull and old for all the rest of his life. . . . Yes, he would get better. But it would no longer be necessary to raise his voice to a roar, to make his movements rough and blunt, to make a show of strength and force and roughness; for they would now all see through the sad pretence. He would jog along through his small, shadowed life, until the shadows gathered around him. . . as they were now gathering around his mother; and. . . and. . . and his children would never again recognize in