He must begin, however, by mentioning her
name, and this he found it impossible to do. He persuaded himself that
he could make an honest statement without speaking her name; he
persuaded himself that his feeling had very little to do with her.
"Unhappiness is a state of mind," he said, "by which I mean that it is
not necessarily the result of any particular cause."
This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it became more
and more obvious to him that, whatever he might say, his unhappiness
had been directly caused by Katharine.
"I began to find my life unsatisfactory," he started afresh. "It
seemed to me meaningless." He paused again, but felt that this, at any
rate, was true, and that on these lines he could go on.
"All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office,
what's it FOR? When one's a boy, you see, one's head is so full of
dreams that it doesn't seem to matter what one does. And if you're
ambitious, you're all right; you've got a reason for going on. Now my
reasons ceased to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That's very
likely now I come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything,
though?) Still, it's impossible, after a certain age, to take oneself
in satisfactorily.
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