He sighed and lay back in his chair and was silent. He wished he had followed his original plan and walked home. Then he would not have seen the door close. If only he had not seen it close — but he had seen it, and having seen it he had to take a stand. It was partly the fault of the house, which was much too small. Any house would have been too small, but this one was much too small. There wasn’t a corner in it where you could hide without causing questions — those silent questions that were not questions at all but reproaches.

There was no possible way for Hubert to ignore what went on in the house. He would have liked to be able to shut his eyes. Then he could control his temper. Rose was not ashamed that she had closed the door against him; she was only frightened because she had been caught closing it.

He wished he had had sense enough to go down to the kitchen and have it out with her the minute he saw the door close. He felt he was walking along a path that was separated from another identical path by a glass wall so high that it went out of sight. The path he was following was full of mistakes that he recognized, because they were all his own, but while every mistake was familiar to him, every mistake came as a shock, because of the different intervals of time that elapsed between one mistake and the next. Just when he felt fine and imagined everything to be all right, there was another blunder. There seemed to be no escaping the contentiousness and disagreeableness in this house. And all the time he was making mistakes and tripping over himself, he could see through the glass to that other path that was also his own. On that path there were no mistakes, and he did only the right thing and did it at the right time, and he knew how to deal with everything, and he walked like a man who was in command of himself and his life. Sometimes it seemed that only a trick of light, nothing at all, stood between Hubert and the place where he would know how to conduct life in accordance with its meaning, which he understood perfectly.

Nothing in his life made sense. But once you had said that you had said it all. Hubert could hardly march out of his house and down onto the main road and stop some stranger and say, “I understand nothing.” To do a thing like that would be — it would be the action of a madman.