isillusioned and disappointed with life despite all of the prestige he has achieved. He desires the garden but now finds himself feeling guilty and unworthy of it because he so consistently and so often rejected chances to enter. He is convinced that his last chance to regain that joy and magic has been taken away. He is heartsick. As he puts it:
"Here I am!" he repeated, "and my chance has gone from me. Three times in one year the door has been offered me--the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone--"....Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying me. For two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all, except the most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is full of inappeasable regrets. At nights--when it is less likely I shall be recognised--I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder what people would think of that if they knew. A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that most vital of all departments, wandering alone--grieving--sometimes near audibly lamenting--for a door, for a garden!"
The narrator tells Wallace that perhaps it is not too late. Perhaps he could try again and this time go through the door into the garden. At the end of the story, the police find Wallace dead. Apparently, he had gone through a doorway at East Kensington Station that was suppose to have been kept locked but was not and, going through it, he fell down a shaft. The narrator is left to wonder whether that is all there is to the story or perhaps Wallace actually went through a miraculous and amazing doorway to something far better and more joyful than our everyday worldly reality.
In terms of themes, the first and most important is that in this story, H. G. wells questions reality and explores the world just beyond it. And this trait or characteristic, according to Costa (1985) was very much charac...