Of course, my dear, I cannot, how could I, altogether regret what has happened.

I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.

Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one's life went wrong?

I wonder if this is the end, thought Ducane, and if so what it will all have amounted to. How tawdry and small it has all been.

Year after year he wondered if he should go back and year after year felt it all recede from him past hope, past endeavour . . . He could not find his way back there.

Why did I ever leave them, what was I fleeing from? What spoilt scene that I could not then endure?

I felt at times, it is hard to describe this, almost mad with guilt, with a sort of general guilt about my whole life.