n the fact. The other things that occur only add to this unpleasantness and bring out Ferris's failures as a human being and as a lover. He sees his ex-wife on the street and follows her, at first intending to speak to her, but soon merely following her without speaking or making his presence known. We can presume that they divorced because he failed to make a connection with her as a human being, though the reason for the divorce is not indicated in the story. What does emerge in the story is that the sojourner leaves everyone and everything behind in his life and continues this pattern, and though at the end of the story he seems to be prepared to change this, he will be unable to do so and will leave his current situation one day just as he left his family, his home, his wife, and even his country.
Ferris is a man who is becoming aware of the passing of time, which also makes him begin to reconsider his habit of leaving people behind. He has returned for his father's funeral, someone else he left behind and has not seen for some time:
The shock of death had made him aware of youth already passed. His hair was receding and the veins in his now naked temples were pulsing and prominent and his body was spare except for an incipient belly bulge (McCullers 292).
When he sees his ex-wife, he is taken by the degree to which she looks just the way she did when they were married, with the same "beautiful carriage":
It was eight years since Ferris had last seen his ex-wife. He knew that long ago she had married again. And there were children. During recent years he had seldom thought of her. But at first, after the divorce, the loss had almost destroyed him. Then after the anodyne of time, he had loved again, and then again (McCullers 293).
When Ferris goes to visit his ex-wife and her new family, that family stands for all that he might have had if he had really possessed the love that Elizabeth and Bailey have ...