They said I was a simpleton; they said I was not master in my home. Some grinned at me without knowing why they grinned, and their fellows grinned also and shook their heads. My wife had set the horns on me, my father had disowned me, and my patients to a man had died. They clucked and groaned to think of me. When I passed, their eyebrows delivered bilious sermons. Over bowls of wine the talkative outdid themselves, inventing failures and humiliations for me to inhabit; and when they spoke to me directly they laughed behind their civil faces. And I, of course, said nothing; I did not complain. I felt that they were right so to peek at me; I shrugged and went on shrugging. I knew what ridicule I deserved, better than they. Why should I feel put-upon? But then I also did feel put-upon, I felt my miserable condition acutely and with drooping spirits. I allowed my gaze often to slide off to one side and run in a filthy abject stream away across the flags. I felt the injustice of all men and still worse of all their women; my days were a meticulously choreographed dance of dolour, and I wept at all times for myself.
What a repulsive character, you will say, I won’t abide it! I won’t be made to sit through the song of a cat like that! Indeed.
The women listened rapt, pale with imaginary anguish or droopy-lidded with worldliness or disbelief. The men exchanged a look or cringed or cracked their knuckles.
There was a very small silence, an eyeball of silence, before someone said, in a long, slow way, “No-o-o.” And the others shifted on the couches, relieved by this exhalation of doubt, and then there was a longer silence; or rather silence apart from the sound of T. sucking on the pit of a prune.