If Haldane had been left alone on an ice-floe in the Arctic Ocean he could scarcely have felt worse than he did during the remainder of the day after Mrs. Arnot's departure. A dreary and increasing sense of isolation oppressed him. The words of his visitor, "What have you to do with the world?" and "If you were dead it would forget you in a few days," repeated themselves over and over again. His vindictive feeling against society died out in the consciousness of his weakness and insignificance. What is the use of one's smiting a mountain with his fist? Only the puny hand feels the blow. The world became, under Mrs. Arnot's words, too large and vague a generality even to be hated.
In order to be a misanthrope one must also be an egotist, dwarfing the objects of his spite, and exaggerating the small atom that has arrayed itself against the universe. It is a species of insanity, wherein a mind has lost perception of the correct relationship between different existences. The poor hypochondriac who imagined himself a mountain was a living satire on many of his fellow-creatures, who differ only in being able to keep similar delusions to themselves.
Mrs. Arnot's plain, honest, yet kindly words had thrown down the walls of prejudice, and Haldane's mind lay open to the truth. As has been said, his first impression was a strange and miserable sense of loneliness. He saw what a slender hold he had upon the rest of humanity. The majority knew nothing of him, while, with few exceptions, those who were aware of his existence despised and detested him, and would breathe more freely if assured of his death. He instinctively felt that the natural affections of his mother and sisters were borne down and almost overwhelmed by his course and character. If they had any visitors in the seclusion to which his disgrace had driven them, his name would be avoided with morbid sensitiveness, and yet all would be as painfully conscious of him as if he were a corpse in the room, which by some monstrous necessity could not be buried. While they might shed natural tears, he was not sure but that deep in their hearts would come a sense of relief should they hear that he was dead, and so could not deepen the stain he had already given to a name once so respectable. He knew that his indifference and overbearing manner toward his sisters had alienated them from him; while in respect to Mrs. Haldane, her aristocratic conventionality, the most decided trait of her character, would always be in sharp contest with her strong mother-love, and thus he would ever be only a source of disquiet and wretchedness whether present or absent. In view of the discordant elements and relations now existing, there was not a place on earth less attractive than his own home.