Olivier was not strong enough to fight against it. He, too, had changed.
He had given up his work, and had no fixed and compulsory occupation. He
wrote, and the balance of his life was adjusted by it. Till then he had
suffered because he could not give his whole life to art. Now that he
could do so he felt utterly lost in the cloudy world. Art which is not also
a profession, and supported by a healthy practical life, art which
knows not the necessity of earning the daily bread, loses the best part
of its force and its reality. It is only the flower of luxury. It is
not--(what in the greatest, the only great, artists it is)--the sacred
fruit of human suffering.--Olivier felt a disinclination to work, a
desire to ask: "What is the good of it?" There was nothing to make him
write: he would let his pen run on, he dawdled about, he had lost his
bearings. He had lost touch with his own class of men and women
patiently plowing the hard furrow of their lives. He had fallen into a
different world, where he was ill at ease, though on the whole he did
not find it unpleasant. Weak, amiable, and curious, he fell complacently
to observing that world which was entirely lacking in consistency,
though it was not without charm; and he did not see that little by
little he was becoming contaminated by it: it was undermining his faith.

No doubt the transformation was not so rapid in him as it was in
Jacqueline.--Women have the terrible privilege of being able suddenly to
undergo a complete change. The way in which they suddenly die and then
as suddenly come to life again is appalling to those who love them. And
yet it is perfectly natural for a human being who is full of life
without the curb of the will not to be to-morrow what it is to-day. A
woman is like running water. The man who loves her must follow the
stream or divert it into the channel of his own life. In both cases
there must be change. But it is a dangerous experience, and no man