Read "In their Wisdom" by C.P. Snow online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
More than once that summer James Ryle recalled asking Hillmorton in Brooks' whether anything was wrong, and being told that it was only a slight malaise. Ryle recalled it, because that seemed some sort of description of his own state. Not physically: he felt as well as he had for years past. But he was disturbed, nerves too near the surface, in a way he had not learned to cope with, as though he were living his life backwards.
The charm, and it had been a charm, of feeling the spring of love again had now quite left him. It was humiliating. It was ludicrous, to be hankering after a woman who scarcely noticed him. She never would. He hadn't seen anyone more totally surrendered to immolating love. He was enough in control of himself to accept that.