It was a rebuke of fate to his own illogical and useless vapourings.

Men died every second whilst women danced, and no one who knew life had any care save for the measure of their own days.

Some freakish thought pleaded stridently his own justification.

His mind travelled back down the gloomy avenues of his past, along those last aching years of grinding and undeserved poverty.

He remembered his upbringing, his widowed mother, a woman used to every luxury, struggling to make both ends meet in a suburban street, in a hired cottage filled with hired furniture.