"O God, O my God, _can_ I ever grow so old? So old as those two old people were?... Is it possible that I shall slowly wither and fade, gradually dying and dragging myself along, always with that same gnawing at my heart, always with that same sorrow, a sorrow which I cannot yet utter to anybody, to anybody ... not even to Steyn ... because I will not judge, because I _can_ not judge ... because Elly is right from her point of view ... because she lives in what she is now doing and would pine if she always remained with me, by whose side she feels herself to be useless ... aimless ... aimless?..."
O God, no, let him not grow old, let him die young, die young and not, year after year, feel the dread pressing more and more heavily on his small, vain soul, his soul so childishly terrified of what was to come!... Let him not, year after year, feel that dread gnawing more and more at his heart, like an animal eating his heart away, and let him not, for years and years on end, feel that silent sorrow weeping within him, never uttered or shown, not even to Elly, if she ever came back, because he would want to assure her with a smile that he understood her aspirations and respected them and approved and admired them!
Loneliness was all around him now: his father was gone, Steyn was gone; Elly was so far from him, in a sphere to which, despite her letters, he was so little able to follow her in thought, a sphere of terror and horror so great that he kept on asking himself:
"Can she do _that?_... Has she the strength to keep it up?... Those hospitals ... the din of the battlefield thundering in her ears ... the sufferings of the wounded ... their cries ... their blood: could she hear and see all that ... and devote herself ... and act?..."
When he saw it looming up out of her hurried letters, it was so terrible a vision that he did not see Elly in it: she faded and passed into somebody else, he did not know her, hardly knew her even in the photograph which she had sent him and in which he vacantly looked for his wife among a number of other Red Cross nurses.... No, in this photograph she looked neither like him nor Mamma: she was herself this time, another, some one quite different.... The energy of her undreaming, harder eyes startled him: in this portrait he saw, in a sort of bewildered ecstasy, a willing, a striving perhaps to transcend the bounds which she already saw before her!... Oh, was it possible that she might soon return, worn out, and fall asleep in his arms? Had he the right to wish it, for himself ... and for her? Ought he not rather to hope that she would persevere and live according to the career which she herself had chosen? Perhaps so ... but to him it was such an unspeakable grief that she was not there, that she was not by his side, she whom he had come to love as he never thought that he could love!...