"However, we don't agree; I only wanted you to understand." She shifted her position, as if she were about to go.

An instinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph rise at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly empty kitchen, checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open it and step out into the garden.

A moralist might have said that at this point his mind should have been full of self-reproach for the suffering he had caused.

On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with the confused impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but efficiently frustrated.

He was trapped by the illogicality of human life.