Vandover began to feel strange.

At first the room looked unfamiliar to him, then his own daily life no longer seemed recognizable, and, finally, all of a sudden, it was the whole world, all the existing order of things, that appeared to draw off like a refluent tide, leaving him alone, abandoned, cast upon some fearful, mysterious shore.
Nothing seemed worth while; all the thousand little trivial things that made up the course of his life and in which he found diversion and amusement palled upon him.

A fearful melancholia settled over him, a despair, an abhorrence of living that could not be uttered.

This only was during the day.

It was that night that Vandover went down into the pit.
He went to bed early, his brain in a whirl, his frame worn out as if from long physical exertion.