Yes, he became a savage unawares. Of the fact that there might be another existence—an existence full of sound and fury, and constantly seething and changing—the existence which eternally appeals to a man and, sooner or later, absorbs him, since it will take no denial—he had not an inkling. True, it was not that he had never heard of it; it was, rather, that he had never himself known it, and had never sought such knowledge. From infancy upwards he had been sunk in a state of mental isolation which had gradually become confirmed through the fact of its being swallowed up by the deepest and most insatiable of all passions; by the passion which exhausts the vital forces without according such beings as Ordynov any foothold in the sphere of practical, everyday, strenuous activity. That passion was love of learning. Like a slow poison it was corroding his youth, destroying his capacity for sleep, and injuring his appetite both for healthy sustenance and for the fresh air which occasionally penetrated to his narrow retreat. Yet his state of morbid exaltation had never allowed of his noticing these things. He was young, and his wants were modest. Indeed, his passion for books had already rendered him an infant as regards any fitting of him for competition with his peers whenever it should become necessary for him to win a place in their ranks. In the hands of its more skilful devotees science is so much capital; whereas Ordynov’s scientific devotion was a weapon which he was turning against himself.

Moreover, this devotion of his was an unconscious abstraction rather than a logically thought-out means for the acquisition of knowledge and culture; and the same peculiarity had marked every other pursuit—even the most petty—in which he had engaged. From his earliest days he had had a reputation for singularity, as being a boy between whom and his comrades there was nothing in common. Parents he had never known, and his strange, retiring nature, had earned for him, at school, much bad treatment and brutality. Consequently, thrown back upon himself, he had come to be shy, morose, and practically a world of his own. Yet in his solitary pursuits there had not, at first, been any system or ordered routine—everything had represented only the first raptures, the first enthusiasms, the first fever of an artist; but now he had created for himself a system which had grown with the years until in his soul it had come to establish a vague, a dim, yet a perfectly comfortable, form of ideas which were gradually undergoing incarnation into such a new and brilliant shape as his soul at once yearned for and found a burden. Already he was faintly conscious of the originality of this form—of its truth and of its power to stand alone. It was a creation which corresponded to his strength; it was one which was gradually materialising; it was one which was ever gathering unto itself new vigour. But the term of its incarnation and final fulfilment was yet a long way off—perhaps a very long way off—perhaps altogether beyond reach!