IX
The game learned behind the big rock must never be played again--that much was certain!
But all resolves proved vain. Fight as he may, the end was inevitably the same.
Previously he had been the player, and had thought no more of it. Now he was being played with, and this new form of the game kept him see-sawing incessantly between ecstasy and agony, between the relief of yielding and the remorse at having yielded.
His life was an unending conflict, and in the presence of that ever renewed struggle within, by forces that seemed alien to his own self, all else lost significance.
And there was not a thing or a person within reach that could offer an antidote to the self-contempt corroding his soul's integrity.