He had to rub his hands together, to pass them again and again over his face to rid himself of the fancy.
But the strange numb feeling at the base of the skull did not keep him from thinking--he would have been glad if it had--and now at last when the terror overcame him it was no longer causeless; he knew now what he feared--he feared that he was going mad.
It was the punishment that he had brought upon himself, some fearful nervous disease, the result of his long indulgence of vice, his vile submission to the brute that was to destroy his reason; some collapse of all his faculties, beginning first with that which was highest, most sensitive--his art--spreading onward and downward till he should have reached the last stages of idiocy.

It was Nature inexorably exacting.

It was the vast fearful engine riding him down beneath its myriad spinning wheels, remorselessly, irresistibly.
The dreadful calamities that he had brought upon himself recoiled upon his head, crushing him to the dust with their weight of anguish and remorse: Ida Wade's suicide, his father's death, his social banishment, the loss of his art, Hiram Wade's lawsuit menacing him with beggary, and now this last, this approaching insanity.

It was no longer fire driving out fire; the sense of all these disasters seemed to come back upon him at once, as keen, as bitter as when they had first befallen.

He had told himself that he did not believe in a hell.