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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne, by William J. Locke
+(#4 in our series by William J. Locke)
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+Title: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
+
+Author: William J. Locke
+
+Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5051]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 10, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Polly Stratton.
+
+For italics, _.._ was used.
+
+
+
+
+THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
+
+
+by William J. Locke
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               PART I
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER I
+
+
+For reasons which will be given later, I sit down here, in
+Verona, to write the history of my extravagant adventure.  I
+shall formulate and expand the rough notes in my diary which lies
+open before me, and I shall begin with a happy afternoon in May,
+six months ago.
+
+
+May 20th.
+
+_London_:--To-day is the seventh anniversary of my release from
+captivity.  I will note it every year in my diary with a sigh of
+unutterable thanksgiving.  For seven long blessed years have I
+been free from the degrading influences of Jones Minor and the
+First Book of Euclid.  Some men find the modern English boy
+stimulating, and the old Egyptian humorous.  Such are the born
+schoolmasters, and schoolmasters, like poets, _nascuntur non
+fiunt_.  What I was born passes my ingenuity to fathom.
+Certainly not a schoolmaster--and my many years of apprenticeship
+did not make me one.  They only turned me into an automaton,
+feared by myself, bantered by my colleagues, and sometimes good-
+humouredly tolerated by the boys.
+
+Seven years ago the lawyer's letter came.  The post used to
+arrive just before first school.  I opened the letter in the
+class-room and sat down at my desk, sick with horror.  The awful
+wholesale destruction of my relatives paralysed me.  My form must
+have seen by my ghastly face that something had happened, for,
+contrary to their usual practice, they sat, thirty of them, in
+stony silence, waiting for me to begin the lesson.  As far as I
+remember anything, they waited the whole hour.  The lesson over,
+I passed along the cloister on my way to my rooms.  I overheard
+one of my urchins, clattering in front of me, shout to another:
+
+"I'm sure he's got the sack!"
+
+Turning round he perceived me, and grew as red as a turkey-cock.
+I laughed aloud.  The boy's yell was a clarion announcement from
+the seventh heaven.  I _had got the sack_! _I_ should never teach
+him quadratic equations again.  I should turn my back forever
+upon those hateful walls and still more abominated playing-
+fields.  And I was not leaving my prison, as I had done once or
+twice before, in order to continue my servitude elsewhere.  I was
+free.  I could go out into the sunshine and look my fellow-man in
+the face, free from the haunting, demoralising sense of
+incapacity.  I was free.  Until that urchin's shriek I had not
+realised it.  My teeth chattered with the thrill.
+
+I was fortunately out of school the second hour.  I employed most
+of it in balancing myself.  A perfectly reasonable creature, I
+visited the chief.  He was a chubby, rotund man, with a circular
+body and a circular visage, and he wore great circular gold
+spectacles.  He looked like a figure in the Third Book of Euclid.
+But his eyes sparkled like bits of glass in the sun.
+
+"Well, Ordeyne?" he inquired, looking up from letters to parents.
+
+"I have come to ask you to accept my resignation," said I.  "I
+would like you to release me at once."
+
+"Come, come, things are not as bad as all that," said he,
+kindly.
+
+I looked stupidly at him for a moment.
+
+"Of course I know you've got one or two troublesome forms," he
+continued.
+
+Then I winced.  His conjecture hurt me horribly.
+
+"Oh, it's nothing to do with my incompetence," I interrupted.
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"My grandfather, two uncles, two nephews and a valet were drowned
+a day or two ago in the Mediterranean," I answered, calmly.
+
+I have since been struck by the crudity of this announcement.  It
+took my chief's breath away.
+
+"I deeply sympathise with you," he said at last.
+
+"Thank you," said I.
+
+"A terrible catastrophe.  No wonder it has upset you.  Horrible!
+Six living human beings!  Three generations of men!"
+
+"That's just it," said I.  "Three generations of my family swept
+away, leaving me now at the head of it."
+
+At this moment the chief's wife came into the library with the
+morning paper in her hand.  On seeing me she rushed forward.
+
+"Have you had bad news?"
+
+"Yes.  Is it in the paper?"
+
+"I was coming to show my husband.  The name is an uncommon one.
+I wondered if they might be relatives of yours."
+
+I bowed acquiescence.  The chief looked at the paragraph below
+his wife's indicating thumb, then he looked at me as if I, too,
+had suffered a seachange.
+
+"I had no idea--" he said.  "Why, now--now you are Sir Marcus
+Ordeyne!"
+
+"It sounds idiotic, doesn't it? " said I, with a smile.  "But I
+suppose I -am."
+
+And so came my release from captivity.  I was profoundly affected
+by the awful disaster, but it would be sheer hypocrisy if I said
+that I felt personal grief.  I knew none of the dead, of whom I
+verily believe the valet was the worthiest man.  My grandfather
+and uncles had ignored my existence.  Not a helping hand had they
+stretched out to my widowed mother in her poverty, when one
+kindly touch would have meant all.
+
+They do not seem to have been a lovable race, the Ordeynes.  What
+my father, the youngest son, was like, I have no idea, as he died
+when I was two years old, but my mother, who was somewhat stern
+and puritanical, spoke of him very much as she would have spoken
+of the prophet Joel, had he been a personal acquaintance.
+
+Seven years to-day have I been a free man.
+
+Feeling at peace with all the world I called this afternoon on my
+Aunt Jessica, Mrs. Ordeyne, who has borne me no malice for
+stepping into the place that should have been the inheritance of
+her husband and of her son.  Rather has she devised to adopt me,
+to guide my ambitions and to point out my duties as the head of
+the house.  If I refuse to be adopted, avoid ambitions and
+disclaim duties, the fault lies not with her good-will.  She is a
+well-preserved worldly woman of fifty-five, and having begun to
+dye her hair in the peroxide of hydrogen era has not the
+curiosity to abandon the practice and see what colour will
+result.  I wish I could like her.  I can't.  She purrs.  Some
+day I feel she will scratch.  She received me graciously.
+
+"My dear Marcus.  At last!  Didn't you know I have been in town
+ever since Easter?"
+
+"No," said I.  "I am afraid I didn't."  Which was true.  "Why
+didn't you tell me?"
+
+"I would have asked you to dinner, but you will never come.  As
+for At Home cards I never dream of sending them to you.  It is a
+waste of precious half-penny stamps."
+
+"You might have written me a nice little letter about nothing at
+all," I suggested.
+
+"For you to say 'What is that woman worrying me with her silly
+letters for?'  I know what you men are."  She looked arch.
+
+This is precisely what I should have said.  As I am not an
+inventive liar, I could only smile feebly.  I am never at my ease
+with Aunt Jessica.  I am not the kind of person to afford her
+entertainment.  I do not belong to her world of opulence, and if
+even I desired it, which the gods forbid, my means would not
+enable me to make the necessary display.  My uncle, thinking to
+retrieve the fallen fortunes of the title, amassed enormous
+wealth as a company promoter, while I, on whom the title has
+descended, am perfectly contented with its fallen fortunes.  I
+have scarcely a thought or taste in common with my aunt.  In
+fact, I must bore her exceedingly.  Yet she hides her boredom
+beneath a radiant countenance and leads me to understand that my
+society gives her inexpressible joy.  I wonder why.
+
+She is always be-guide-philosopher-and-friending me.  I resent
+it.  A man of forty does not need the counsels of an elderly woman
+destitute of intellect.  I believe there are some women who are
+firmly convinced that their sheer sex has imbued them with all
+the qualities of genius.  To-day my aunt tackled me on the
+subject of marriage.  I ought to marry.  I asked why.  It
+appeared it was every man's duty.
+
+"From what point of view?" I asked.  "The mere propagation of the
+human race, or the providing of a superfluous young woman with a
+means of livelihood?  If it is the former, then, in my opinion,
+there are too many people in the world already; and if the
+latter, I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently altruistic."
+
+"You are so _funny!_" laughed my aunt.
+
+I was not aware of being the least bit funny.
+
+"But, seriously," she continued, "you _must_ marry."  She is a
+woman who has an irritating way of speaking in Italics.  "Are you
+aware that if you have no son the title will become extinct?"
+
+"And if it does," I cried, "who on this earth will care a
+half-penny-bun?"
+
+I am growing tired of the title.  At first it was rather amusing.
+Now it appears it is registered in Heaven's chancery and hedged
+about with divine ordinances.  Only the other day an unknown
+parson requested me to open a church bazaar, and I gathered he
+had received his instructions direct from the Almighty.
+
+"Why, every one would care," exclaimed my aunt, genuinely
+shocked.  "It would be monstrous.  You owe it to your descendants
+as well as to your ancestors.  Besides," she added, with apparent
+irrelevance, "a man in your position ought to live up to it."
+
+"I do," said I, "just up to it."
+
+"Now you are pretending you don't understand me.  You ought to
+marry money!"
+
+I smiled and shook my head.  I don't think my aunt likes me to
+smile and shake my head, for I saw a flicker in her eyes.  "No,
+my dear aunt; emphatically no.  It would be comfortless.  If I
+kissed it, it would be cold.  If I put my arms round it, it would
+be full of sharp edges which would hurt.  If I tried to get any
+emotion out of it, it would only jingle."
+
+"What do you want then?"
+
+"Nothing.  But if I must--let it be plain flesh and blood."
+
+"Cannibal!" said my aunt.
+
+We both laughed.
+
+"But you can have plenty of flesh and blood, with money as well,
+for the asking," she insisted; and thereupon my two cousins, Dora
+and Gwendolen, entered the drawingroom and interrupted the
+conversation.  They are both bouncing, fresh-faced girls, in the
+early twenties.  They ride and shoot and bicycle and golf and
+dance, and the elder writes little stories for the magazines.  As
+I do none of these things, I am convinced they regard me as a
+poor sort of creature.  When they hand me a cup of tea I almost
+expect them to pat me on the head and say, "Good dog!"  I am
+long, lean, stooping, hatchet-faced, hawknosed, near-sighted.  I
+have not the breezy air of the jolly young stockbrokers they are
+in the habit of meeting.  They rather alarm me.  Moreover, they
+have managed to rear a colossal pile of wholly incorrect
+information on every subject under the sun, and are addicted to
+letting chunks of it fall about one's ears.  This stuns me,
+rendering conversation difficult.
+
+As I had not seen Dora since her return from Rome, where she had
+spent the early spring, I asked, in some trepidation, for her
+impressions.  Before I could collect myself, I was listening to a
+lecture on St. Peter's.  She told me it was built by Michael
+Angelo.  I suggested that some credit might be given to Bramante,
+not to speak of Rosellino, Baldassare Peruzzi and the two San
+Gallo's.
+
+"Oh!" said my young lady, with a superb air of omniscience.  "It
+was all Michael Angelo's design. _The others only tinkered away
+at it afterwards_."
+
+After receiving this brickbat I took my leave.
+
+To console myself I looked up, during the evening, Michael
+Angelo's noble letter about Bramante.
+
+"One cannot deny," says he, "that Bramante was as excellent in
+architecture as any one has been from the ancients to now.  He
+placed the first stone of St. Peter's, not full of confusion, but
+clear, neat, and luminous, and isolated all round in such a way
+that it injured no part of the palace, and was held to be a
+beautiful thing, as is still apparent, in such a way that any
+one who has departed from the said order of Bramante, as San
+Gallo has done, has departed from the truth."
+
+Michael Angelo did not like San Gallo; neither did he like
+Bramante-who was his senior by thirty years-but this makes his
+appreciation of the elder's work all the more generous.
+
+Tinkered away at it, indeed!
+
+
+May 21st.
+
+I spent all the morning at work by the open window.
+
+I have a small house in Lingfield Terrace, on the north side of
+the Regent's Park, so that my drawing-room, on the first floor,
+has a southern aspect.  It has been warm and sunny for the past
+few days, and the elms and plane-trees across the road are
+beginning to riot in their green bravery, as if intoxicated with
+the golden wine of spring.  My French window is flung wide open,
+and on the balcony a triangular bit of sunlight creeps round as
+the morning advances.  My work-table is drawn up to the window.
+I am busy over the first section of my "History of Renaissance
+Morals," for which I think my notes are completed.  I have a
+delicious sense of isolation from the world.  Away over those
+tree-tops is a faint purpurine pall, and below it lies London,
+with its strife and its misery, its wickedness and its vanity.
+Twenty minutes would take me into the heart of it.  And if I
+chose I could be as struggling, as wretched, as much imbued with
+wickedness and vanity as anybody.  I could gamble on the stock
+exchange, or play the muddy game of politics, or hawk my precious
+title for sale among the young women of London society.  My Aunt
+Jessica once told me that London was at my feet.  I am quite
+content that it should stay there.  I have much the same nervous
+dread of it as I have of an angry sea breaking in surf on the
+shingle.  If I ventured out in it I should be tossed hither and
+thither and broken on the rocks, and I should perish.  I prefer
+to stand aloof and watch.  If I had a little more of daring in my
+nature I might achieve something.  I am afraid I am but a waster
+in the world's factory; but kind Fate, instead of pitching me on
+the rubbish-heap, has preserved me, perhaps has set me under a
+glass case, in her own museum, as a curiosity.  Well, I am happy
+in my shelter.
+
+I was interrupted in my writing by the entrance of my cook and
+housekeeper, Antoinette.  She was sorry to disturb me, but did
+Monsieur like sorrel?  She was preparing some _veau a l'oseille_
+for lunch, and Stenson (my man) had informed her that it was
+disgusting stuff and that Monsieur would not eat it.
+
+"Antoinette," said I, "go and inform Stenson that as he looks
+after my outside so do you look after my inside, and that I have
+implicit confidence in both of you in your respective spheres of
+action."
+
+"But does Monsieur like sorrel?" Antoinette inquired, anxiously.
+
+"I adore it even," said I, and Antoinette made her exit in
+triumph.
+
+What a reverential care French women have for the insides of
+their masters!  At times it is pathetic.  Before now, I have
+thrown dainty morsels which I could not eat into the fire, so as
+to avoid hurting Antoinette's feelings.
+
+I came across her three years ago in a tiny hostelry in a tiny
+town in the Loire district.  She cooked the dinner and conversed
+about it afterwards so touchingly that we soon became united in
+bonds of the closest affection.  Suddenly some money was stolen;
+Antoinette, accused, was dismissed without notice.  I had a
+shrewd suspicion of the thief--a suspicion which was afterwards
+completely justified--and indignantly championed Antoinette's
+cause.
+
+But Antoinette, coming from a village some eighty miles away, was
+a stranger and an alien.  I was her only friend.  It ended in my
+inviting her to come to England, the land of the free and the
+refuge of the downtrodden and oppressed, and become my
+housekeeper.  She accepted, with smiles and tears.  And they were
+great big smiles, that went into creases all over her fat red
+face, forming runnels for the great big tears which dropped off
+at unexpected angles.  She was alone in the world.  Her only son
+had died during his military service in Madagascar.  Although her
+man was dead, the law would not regard her as a widow because she
+had never been married, and therefore refused to exempt her only
+son.  "_On ne peut-etre Jeune qu'une fois, n'est-ce pas,
+Monsieur?_" she said, in extenuation of her early fault.
+
+"And Jean-Marie," she added, "was as brave a fellow and as
+devoted a son as if I had been married by the Saint-Pere
+himself."
+
+I waved my hand in deprecation and told her it did not matter in
+the least.  The della Scalas, supreme lords of Verona for many
+generations, were every man jack of them so parented.  Even
+William the Conqueror--
+
+"_Tiens_ cried Antoinette, consoled, "and he became Emperor of
+Germany--he and Bismarck!"
+
+Antoinette's historical sense is rudimentary.  I have not tried
+since to develop it.
+
+When I brought my victim of foreign tyranny to Lingfield Terrace,
+Stenson, I believe, nearly fainted.  He is the correctest of
+English valets, and his only vice, I believe, is the accordion,
+on which he plays jaunty hymn-tunes when I am out of the house.
+When he had recovered he asked me, respectfully, how they were to
+understand each other.  I explained that he would either have to
+learn French or teach Antoinette English.  What they have done, I
+gather, is to invent a nightmare of a _lingua franca_ in which
+they appear to hold amicable converse.  Now and again they have
+differences of opinion, as to-day, over my taste for _veau a
+l'oseille_; but, on the whole, their relations are harmonious,
+and she keeps him in a good-humour: Naturally, she feeds the
+brute.
+
+The duty-impulse, stimulated by my call yesterday on one aunt by
+marriage, led my footsteps this afternoon to the house of the
+other, Mrs. Ralph Ordeyne.  She is of a different type from her
+sister-in-law, being a devout Roman Catholic, and since the
+terrible affliction of two years ago has concerned herself more
+deeply than ever in the affairs of her religion.  She lives in a
+gloomy little house in a sunless Kensington by-street.  Only my
+Cousin Rosalie was at home.  She gave me tea made with tepid
+water and talked about the Earl's Court Exhibition, which she had
+not visited, and a new novel, of which she had vaguely heard.  I
+tried in vain to infuse some life into the conversation.  I don't
+believe she is interested in anything.  She even spoke lukewarmly
+of Farm Street.
+
+I pity her intensely.  She is thin, thirty, colourless,
+bosomless.  I should say she was passionless--a predestined
+spinster.  She has never drunk hot tea or lived in the sun or
+laughed a hearty laugh.  I remember once, at my wit's end for
+talk, telling her the old story of Theodore Hook accosting a
+pompous stranger on the street with the polite request that he
+might know whether he was anybody in particular.  She said,
+without a smile, "Yes, it was astonishing how rude some people
+could be."
+
+And her godfathers and godmothers gave her the name of Rosalie.
+Mine might just as well have called me Hercules or Puck.
+
+She told me that her mother intended to ask me to dine with them
+one evening next week.  When was I free?  I chose Thursday.
+Oddly enough I enjoy dining there, although we are on the most
+formal terms, not having got beyond the "Sir Marcus" and "Mrs.
+Ordeyne." But both mother and daughter are finely bred
+gentlewomen, and one meets few, oh, very, very few among the
+ladies of to-day.
+
+I reached home about six and found a telegram awaiting me.
+
+"_Sorry can't give you dinner.  Cook in an impossible condition.
+Come later._  Judith."
+
+I must confess to a sigh of relief.  I am fond of Judith and
+sorry for her domestic infelicities, though why she should
+maintain that alcoholized wretch in her kitchen passes my
+comprehension.  If there is one thing women do not understand it
+is the selection, the ordering, and the treatment of domestic
+servants.  The mere man manages much better.  But, that aside,
+Antoinette has spoiled me for Judith's cook's cookery.  I
+breathed a little sigh of content and summoned Stenson to inform
+him that I would dine at home.
+
+A great package of books from a second-hand bookseller arrived
+during dinner.  Among them were the nine volumes of Pietro
+Gianone's _Istoria Civile del Regno di Napoli_, a copy of which I
+ought to have possessed long ago.  It is dedicated to the "Most
+Puissant and Felicitous Prince Charles VI, the Great, by God
+crowned Emperor of the Romans, King of Germany, Spain, Naples,
+Hungary, Bohemia, Sicily, _etcetera_."  Is there a living soul in
+God's universe who has a spark of admiration for this most
+puissant and most felicitous monarch crowned by God Emperor and
+King of the greater part of Europe (and docked of most of his
+pretensions by the Treaty of Utrecht)?  We only remember the
+forcible-feeble person by his Pragmatic Sanction, and otherwise
+his personality has left in history not the remotest trace.  And
+yet, on the 12th February, 1723, a profoundly erudite, subtle,
+and picturesque historian grovels before the man and subscribes
+himself "Of your Holy Caesarean and Catholic Majesty the most
+humble and most devoted and most obsequious vassal and slave
+Pietro Gianone."  What ruthless judgments posterity passes on
+once enormous reputations!  In Gianone's admirable introduction
+we hear of "_il celebre Arthur Duck, il quale oltro a' con
+confini della sua Inghilterra volle in altri a piu lontani Paesi
+andav rintracciando l'uso a l'autorita delle romane leggi ne'
+nuovi domini de' Principi cristiani; e di quelle di ciascheduna
+Nazione volle ancora aver conto: le ricerco nella vicina Scozia,
+e nell' Ibernia; trapasso nella Francia, e nella Spagna; in
+Germania, in Italia, a nel nostro Regno ancora: si stese in oltre
+in Polonia, Boemia, in Ungheria, Danimarca, nella Svezia, ed in
+piu remote parti_."  A devil of a fellow this celebrated English
+Arthur Duck, who besides writing a learned treatise _De Usu et
+Auth. Jur. Civ. Rom. in Dominiis Principum Christianorum_, was a
+knight, a member of Parliament, chancellor of the diocese of
+London, and a master in chancery.  Gianone flattens himself out
+for a couple of pages before this prodigy whom he lovingly calls
+_Ariuro_, as who should say Raffaelo or Giordano; and now, where
+in the hearts of men lingers Sir Arthur Duck?  For one thing he
+had a bad name.  Our English sense of humour revolts from making
+a popular hero of a man called Duck.  Yet we made one of Drake.
+But there was something masculine about the latter: in fact,
+everything.
+
+I am afraid it was rather late when I got to Judith.
+
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER II
+
+
+May 22d.
+
+I wonder whether I should be happier now if I had lived in a
+garret "in the brave days when I was twenty-one," if I had
+undergone the lessons of misery with the attendant compensations
+of "_une folle maitresse, de francs amis et l'amour des chansons_,"
+ and had joyous-heartedly mounted my six flights of stairs.  I
+lived modestly, it is true; but never for a moment was I doubtful
+as to my next meal, and I have always enjoyed the creature comforts
+of the respectable classes; never did Lisette pin her shawl
+curtain-wise across my window.  Sometimes, nowadays, I almost wish
+she had.  I never dreamed of glory, love, pleasure, madness, or
+spent my lifetime in a moment, like the singer of the immortal
+song.  Often the weary moments seemed a lifetime.
+
+And now that I am forty, "it is too late a week."  Boon
+companions, of whom I am thankful to say I have none, would drive
+me crazy with their intolerable heartiness.  I once spent an
+evening at the Savage Club.  As for the _folle maitresse_--as a
+concomitant of my existence she transcends imagination.
+
+"What are you thinking of?" asked Judith.
+
+"I was thinking how the _'Dans un grenier qu'on est bien a vingt
+ans'_ principle would have worked in my own case," I answered
+truthfully, for the above reflections had been Passing through my
+mind.
+
+Judith laughed.
+
+"You in a garret?  Why, you haven't got a temperament!"
+
+I suppose I haven't.  It never occurred to me before.  Beranger
+omitted that from his list of attendant compensations.
+
+"That's the difference between us," she added, after a pause.  "I
+have a temperament and you haven't."
+
+"I hope you find it a great comfort."
+
+"It is ten times more uncomfortable than a conscience.  It is the
+bane of one's existence."
+
+"Why be so proud of having it?"
+
+"You wouldn't understand if I told you," said Judith.
+
+I rose and walked to the window and gazed meditatively at the
+rain which swept the uninspiring little street.  Judith lives in
+Tottenham Mansions, in the purlieus of the Tottenham Court Road.
+The ground floor of the building is a public-house, and on summer
+evenings one can sit by the open windows, and breathe in the
+health-giving fumes of beer and whisky, and listen to the sweet,
+tuneless strains of itinerant musicians.  When my new fortunes
+enabled me to give the dear woman just the little help that
+allowed her to move into a more commodious flat, she had the many
+mansions of London to choose from.  Why she insisted on this
+abominable locality I could never understand.  It isn't as if the
+flat were particularly cheap; indeed the fact of its being
+situated over a public-house seems to enhance the rent.  She said
+she liked the shape of the knocker and the pattern of the
+bathroom taps.  I dimly perceive that it must have had something
+to do with the temperament.
+
+"It always seems to rain when we propose an outing together.
+This is the fourth time since Easter," I remarked.
+
+We had planned a sedate country jaunt, but as the day was pouring
+wet we remained at home.
+
+"Perhaps this is the way the _bon Dieu_ has of expressing his
+disapproval of us," said Judith.
+
+"Why should he disapprove?" I asked.
+
+A shrug of her shoulders ended in a shiver.
+
+"I am chilled through."
+
+"My dear girl," I cried, "why on earth haven't you lit the fire?"
+
+"The last time I lit it you said the room was stuffy."
+
+"But then it was beautiful blazing sunshine, you illogical
+woman," I exclaimed, searching my pockets for a match-box.
+
+I struck a match.  To apply it to the fire I had to kneel by her
+chair.  She stretched out her hand--she has delicate white hands
+with slender fingers--and lightly touched my head.
+
+"How long have we known each other?" she asked.
+
+"About eight years."
+
+"And how long shall we go on?"
+
+"As long as you like," said I, intent on the fire.
+
+Judith withdrew her hand.  I knelt on the hearthrug until the
+merry blaze and crackle of the wood assured me of successful
+effort.
+
+"These are capital grates," I said, cheerfully, drawing a
+comfortable arm-chair to the front of the fire.
+
+"Excellent," she replied, in a tone devoid of interest.
+
+There was a long silence.  To me this is one of the great charms
+of human intercourse.  Is there not a legend that Tennyson and
+Carlyle spent the most enjoyable evenings of their lives
+enveloped in impenetrable silence and tobacco-smoke, one on each
+side of the hob?  A sort of Whistlerian nocturne of golden fog!
+
+I offered Judith a cigarette.  She declined it with a shake of
+the head.  I lit one myself and leaning back contentedly in my
+chair watched her face in half-profile.  Most people would call
+her plain.  I can't make up my mind on the point.  She is what is
+termed a negative blonde--that is to say, one with very fair hair
+(in marvellous abundance--it is one of her beauties), a sallow
+complexion and deep violet eyes.  Her face is thin, a little
+worn, that of the woman who has suffered--temperament again!  Her
+mouth, now, as she looks into the new noisy flames, is drawn down
+at the corners.  Her figure is slight but graceful.  She has
+pretty feet.  One protruded from her skirt, and a slipper dangled
+from the tip.  At last it fell off.  I knew it would.  She has a
+craze for the minimum of material in slippers--about an inch of
+leather (I suppose it's leather) from the toe.  I picked the vain
+thing up and balanced it again on her stocking-foot.
+
+"Will you do that eight years hence?" said Judith.
+
+"My dear, as I've done it eight thousand times the last eight
+years, I suppose I shall," I replied, laughing.  "I'm a creature
+of habit."
+
+"You may marry, Marcus."
+
+"God forbid!" I ejaculated.
+
+"Some pretty fresh girl."
+
+"I abominate pretty fresh girls.  I would just as soon talk to a
+baby in a perambulator."
+
+"The women men are crazy to marry are not always those they
+particularly delight to converse with, my friend," said Judith.
+
+I lit another cigarette.  "I think the sex feminine has marriage
+on the brain," I exclaimed, somewhat heatedly.  "My Aunt Jessica
+was worrying me about it the day before yesterday.  As if it were
+any concern of hers!"
+
+Judith laughed below her breath and called me a simpleton.
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+"Because you haven't got a temperament."
+
+This was a foolish answer, having no bearing on the question.  I
+told her so.  She replied that she was years older than I, and
+had learned the eternal relevance of all things.  I pointed out
+that she was years younger.
+
+"How many heart-beats have you had in your life--real, wild,
+pulsating heart-beats--eternity in an hour?"
+
+"That's Blake," I murmured.
+
+"I'm aware of it.  Answer my question."
+
+"It's a silly question."
+
+"It isn't.  The next time you see a female baby in a
+perambulator, take off your hat respectfully."
+
+I am afraid I am clumsy at repartee.
+
+"And the next time you engage a cook, my dear Judith," said I,
+"send for a mere man."
+
+She coloured up.  I dissolved myself in apologies.  Her wounded
+susceptibilities required careful healing.  The situation was
+somewhat odd.  She had not scrupled to attack the innermost
+weaknesses of my character, and yet when I retaliated by a hit at
+externals, she was deeply hurt, and made me feel a ruffianly
+blackguard.  I really think if Lisette had pinned up that curtain
+I should have learned something more about female human nature.
+But Judith is the only woman I have known intimately all my life
+long, and sometimes I wonder whether I shall ever know her.  I
+told her so once.  She answered: "If you loved me you would know
+me."  Very likely she was right.  Honestly speaking, I don't love
+Judith.  I am accustomed to her.  She is a lady, born and bred.
+She is an educated woman and takes quite an intelligent interest
+in the Renaissance.  Indeed she has a subtler appreciation of the
+Venetian School of Painting than I have.  She first opened my
+eyes, in Italy, to the beauties, as a gorgeous colourist, of
+Palma Vecchio in his second or Giorgionesque manner.  She is in
+every way a sympathetic and entertaining companion.  Going
+deeper, to the roots of human instinct, I find she represents to
+me--so chance has willed it--the _ewige weibliche_ which must
+complement masculinity in order to produce normal existence.  But
+as for the "_zieht uns hinan_"--no.  It would not attract me
+hence--out of my sphere.  I could commit an immortal folly for no
+woman who ever made this planet more lustrous to its
+Bruderspharen.
+
+I don't understand Judith.  It doesn't very greatly matter.  Many
+things I don't understand, the spiritual attitude towards
+himself, for example, of the intelligent juggler who expends his
+life's energies in balancing a cue and three billiard-balls on
+the tip of his nose.  But I know that Judith understands me, and
+therein lies the advantage I gain from our intimacy.  She gauges,
+to an absurdly subtle degree, the depth of my affection.  She is
+really an incomparable woman.  So many insist upon predilection
+masquerading as consuming passion.  There is nothing theatrical
+about Judith.
+
+Yet to-day she appeared a little touchy, moody, unsettled.  She
+broke another pleasant spell of fireside silence, that followed
+expiation of my offence, by suddenly calling my name.
+
+"Yes?" said I, inquiringly.
+
+"I want to tell you something.  Please promise me you won't be
+vexed."
+
+"My dear Judith," said I, "my great and imperial namesake, in
+whose meditations I have always found ineffable comfort, tells me
+this: 'If anything external vexes you, take notice that it is not
+the thing which disturbs you, but your notion about it, which
+notion you may dismiss at once, if you please!'  So I promise to
+dismiss all my notions of your disturbing communication and not
+to be vexed."
+
+"If there is one platitudinist I dislike more than another, it is
+Marcus Aurelius," said Judith.
+
+I laughed.  It was very comfortable to sit before the fire, which
+protested, in a fire's cheery, human way, against the depression
+of the murky world outside, and to banter Judith.
+
+"I can quite understand it," I said.  "A man sucks in the
+consolations of philosophy; a woman solaces herself with
+religion."
+
+"I can do neither," she replied, changing her attitude with an
+exaggerated shaking down of skirts.  "If I could, I shouldn't
+want to go away."
+
+"Go away?" I echud.
+
+"Yes.  You mustn't be vexed with me.  I haven't got a cook--"
+
+"No one would have thought it, from the luncheon you gave me, my
+dear."
+
+The alcoholized domestic, by the way, was sent out, bag and
+baggage, last evening, when she was sober enough to walk.
+
+"And so it is a convenient opportunity," Judith continued,
+ignoring my compliment--and rightly so; for as soon as it had
+been uttered, I was struck by an uneasy conviction that she had
+herself disturbed the French caterers in the Tottenham Court Road
+from their Sabbath repose in order to provide me with food.
+
+"I can shut up the flat without any fuss.  I am never happy at
+the beginning of a London season.  I know I'm silly," she went
+on, hurriedly.  "If I could stand your dreadful Marcus Aurelius I
+might be wiser--I don't mind the rest of the year; but in the
+season everybody is in town--people I used to know and mix with
+--I meet them in the streets and they cut me and it--hurts--and
+so I want to get away somewhere by myself.  When I get sick of
+solitude I'll come back."
+
+One of her quick, graceful movements brought her to her knees by
+my side.  She caught my hand.
+
+"For pity's sake, Marcus, say that you understand why it is."
+
+I said, "I have been a blatant egoist all the afternoon, Judith.
+I didn't guess.  Of course I understand."
+
+"If you didn't, it would be impossible for us."
+
+"Have no doubt," said I, softly, and I kissed her hand.
+
+I came into her life when she counted it as over and done with
+--at eight and twenty--and was patiently undergoing premature
+interment in a small pension in Rome.  How long her patience
+would have lasted I cannot say.  If circumstances had been
+different, what would have happened? is the most futile of
+speculations.  What did happen was the drifting together of us
+two bits of flotsam and our keeping together for the simple
+reason that there were no forces urging us apart.  She was past
+all care for social sanctions, her sacred cap of good repute
+having been flung over the windmills long before; and I,
+friendless unit in a world of shadows, why should I have rejected
+the one warm hand that was held out to me?  As I said to her this
+afternoon, Why should the _bon Dieu_ disapprove?  I pay him the
+compliment of presuming that he is a broad-minded deity.
+
+When my fortune came, she remarked, "I am glad I am not free.  If
+I were, you would want to marry me, and that would be fatal."
+
+The divine, sound sense of the dear woman!  Honour would compel
+the offer.  Its acceptance would bring disaster.
+
+Marriage has two aspects.  The one, a social contract, a _quid_
+of protection, maintenance, position and what not, for a _quo_ of
+the various services that may be conveniently epitomized in the
+phrase _de mensa et thoro_.  The other, the only possible
+existence for two beings whose passionate, mutual attraction
+demands the perfect fusion of their two existences into a common
+life.  Now to this passionate attraction I have never become,
+and, having no temperament (thank Heaven!), shall never become, a
+party.  Before the turbulence therein involved I stand affrighted
+as I do before London or the deep sea.  I once read an epitaph in
+a German churchyard: "I will awake, O Christ, when thou callest
+me; but let me sleep awhile, for I am very weary."  Has the human
+soul ever so poignantly expressed its craving for quietude?  I
+fancy I should have been a heart's friend of that dead man, who,
+like myself, loved the cool and quiet shadow, and was not allowed
+to enjoy it in this world.  I may not get the calm I desire, but
+at any rate my existence shall not be turned upside down by mad
+passion for a woman.  As for the social-contract aspect of
+marriage, I want no better housekeeper than Antoinette; and my
+dining-table having no guests does not need a lady to grace its
+foot; I have no _a priori_ craving to add to the population.  "If
+children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason
+alone," says Schopenhauer, "would the human race continue to
+exist?  Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the
+coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? or at
+any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it
+in cold blood?"  By bringing children into the world by means of
+a marriage of convenience I should be imposing the burden of
+existence upon them in cold blood.  I agree with Schopenhauer.
+
+And the dreadful bond of such a marriage!  To have in the closest
+physical and moral propinquity for one hundred and eighty-six
+hours out of the week, each hour surcharged with an obligatory
+exchange of responsibilities, interests, sacrifices of every
+kind, a being who is not the utter brother of my thoughts and
+sister of my dreams--no, never! _Au grand non, au grand jamais!_
+
+Judith is an incomparable woman, but she is not the utter brother
+of my thoughts and the sister of my dreams; nor am I of hers.
+
+But the comradeship she gives me is as food and drink, and my
+affection fulfils a need in her nature.  The delicate adjustment
+of reciprocals is our sanction.  Marriage, were it possible,
+would indeed be fatal.  Our pleasant, free relations, unruffled
+by storm, are ideal for us both.
+
+Why, I wonder, did she think her proposal to go away for a change
+would vex me?
+
+The idea implies a right of veto which is repugnant to me.  Of
+all the hateful attitudes towards a woman in which a decent man
+can view himself that of the Turkish bashaw is the most
+detestable.  Women seldom give men credit for this distaste.
+
+
+I kissed the white hand of Judith that touched my wrist, and told
+her not to doubt my understanding.  She cried a little.
+
+"I don't make your path rougher, Judith?" I whispered.
+
+She checked her tears and her eyes brightened wonderfully.
+
+"You?  You do nothing but smooth it and level it."
+
+"Like a steam-roller," said I.
+
+She laughed, sprang to her feet, and carried me off gaily to the
+kitchen to help her get the tea ready.  My assistance consisted
+in lighting the gas-stove beneath a waterless kettle.  After that
+I sprawled against the dresser and, with my heart in my mouth,
+watched her cut thin bread-and-butter in a woman's deliciously
+clumsy way.  Once, as the bright blade went perilously near her
+palm, I drew in my breath.
+
+"A man would never dream of doing it like that!" I cried, in
+rebuke.
+
+She calmly dropped the wafer on to the plate and handed me the
+knife and loaf.
+
+"Do it your way," she said, with a smile of mock humility.
+
+I did it my way, and cut my finger.
+
+"The devil's in the knife!" I cried.  "But that's the right way."
+
+Judith said nothing, but bound up my wound, and, like the
+well-conducted person of the ballad, went on cutting
+bread-and-butter.   Her smile, however, was provoking.
+
+"And all this time," I said, half an hour later, "you haven't
+told me where you are going."
+
+"Paris.  To stay with Delphine Carrere."
+
+"I thought you said you wanted solitude."
+
+I have met Delphine Carrere -_brave femme_ if ever there was one,
+and the loyalest soul in the world, the only one of Judith's
+early women friends who has totally ignored the fact of the
+Sacred Cap of Good Repute having been thrown over the windmills
+(indeed who knows whether dear, golden-hearted Delphine herself
+could conscientiously write the magic initials S.C.G.R. after her
+name?); but Delphine has never struck me as a person in whose
+dwelling one could find conventual seclusion.  Judith, however,
+explained.
+
+"Delphine will be painting all day, and dissipating all night.  I
+can't possibly disturb her in her studio, for she has to work
+tremendously hard--and I'm decidedly not going to dissipate with
+her.  So I shall have my days and nights to my sequestered and
+meditative self."
+
+I said nothing: but all the same I am tolerably certain that Judith,
+being Judith, will enjoy prodigious merrymaking in Paris.  She is
+absolutely sincere in her intentions--the earth holds no sincerer
+woman--but she is a self-deceiver.  Her about-to-be-sequestered
+and meditative self was at that moment sitting on the arm of a
+chair and smoking a cigarette, with undisguised relish of the good
+things of this life.  The blue smoke wreathing itself amid her fair
+hair resembled, so I told her in the relaxed intellectual frame of
+mind of the contented man, incense mounting through the nimbus of
+a saint.  She affected solicitude lest the life-blood of my
+intelligence should be pouring out through my cut finger.  No, I
+am convinced that the _recueillement_ (that beautiful French word
+for which we have no English equivalent, meaning the gathering of
+the soul together within itself) of the rue Boissy d'Anglais is
+the very happiest delusion wherewith Judith has hitherto deluded
+herself.  I am glad, exceedingly glad.  Her temperament--I have
+got reconciled to her affliction--craves the gaiety which London
+denies her.
+
+"And when are you going?" I asked.
+
+"To-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow?"
+
+"Why not?  I wired Delphine this morning.  I had to go out to get
+something for lunch " (my conviction, it appears, was right),
+"and I thought I might as well take an omnibus to Charing Cross
+and send a telegram."
+
+"But when are you going to pack?"
+
+"I did that last night.  I didn't get to bed till four this
+morning.  I only made up my mind after you had gone," she added,
+in anticipation of a possible question.
+
+It is better that we are not married.  These sudden resolutions
+would throw my existence out of gear.  My moral upheaval would be
+that of a hen in front of a motor-car.  When I go abroad, I like
+at least a fortnight to think of it.  One has to attune one's
+mind to new conditions, to map out the pleasant scheme of days,
+to savour in anticipation the delights that stand there, awaiting
+one's tasting, either in the mystery of the unknown or in the
+welcoming light of familiarity.  I love the transition that can
+be so subtly gradated by the spirit between one scene and
+another.  The man who awakens one fine morning in his London
+residence, scratches his head, and says, "What shall I do to-day?
+By Jove!  I'll start for Timbuctoo!" is to me an
+incomprehensible, incomplete being.  He lacks an aesthetic sense.
+
+I did not dare tell Judith she lacked an aesthetic sense.  I
+might just as well have accused her of stealing silver spoons.  I
+said I should miss her (which I certainly shall), and promised to
+write to her once a week.
+
+"And you," said I, "will have heaps of time to write me the
+History of a Sequestered and Meditative Self--meanwhile, let us
+go out somewhere and dine."
+
+When I got home, I found a card on my hall-table.  "Mr. Sebastian
+Pasquale."
+
+I am sorry I missed Pasquale.  I haven't seen him for two or
+three years.  He is a fascinating youth, a study in reversion.  I
+will ask him to dinner here some day soon.  It will be quieter
+than at the club.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER III
+
+
+May 24th.
+
+Something has happened.  Something fantastic, inconceivable.  I
+am in a condition to be surprised at nothing.  If a witch on a
+broomstick rode in through my open window and lectured me on
+quaternions, I should accept her visit as a normal occurrence.
+
+I have spent hours walking up and down this book-lined room,
+wondering whether the universe or I were mad.  Sometimes I
+laughed, for the thing is sheerly ridiculous.  Sometimes I cursed
+at the impertinence of the thing in happening at all.  Once I
+stumbled over a volume of Muratori lying on the floor, and I
+kicked it across the room.  Then I took it up, and wept over the
+loosened binding.
+
+The question is: What on earth am I to do?  Why has Judith chosen
+this particular time to shut up her flat and sequester herself in
+Paris?  Why did my lawyers appoint this particular morning for me
+to sign their silly documents?  Why did I turn up three hours
+late?  Why did I walk down the Thames Embankment?  And why, oh,
+why, did I seat myself on a bench in the gardens below the
+terrace of the National Liberal Club?
+
+Yesterday was one of the most peaceful and happy days of my
+existence.  I worked contentedly at my history; I gossiped with
+Antoinette who came to demand permission to keep a cat.
+
+"What kind of a cat?" I asked.
+
+"Perhaps Monsieur does not like cats?" she inquired, anxiously.
+
+"The cat was worshipped as a god by the ancient Egyptians," I
+remarked.
+
+"But this one, Monsieur," she said in breathless reassurance,
+"has only one eye."
+
+I would sooner talk to Antoinette than the tutorial staff of
+Girton.  If she woke up one morning and found she had a mind she
+would think it a disease.
+
+In the afternoon I strolled into Regent's Park and meeting the
+McMurray's nine-year-old son in charge of the housemaid, around
+whom seemed to be hovering a sheepish individual in a bowler hat,
+I took him off to the Zoological Gardens.  On the way he told me,
+with great glee, that his German governess was in bed with an
+awful sore throat; that he wasn't doing any lessons; that the
+sheepish hoverer was Milly's young man, and that the silly way
+they went on was enough to make one sick.  When he had fed
+everything feedable and ridden everything ridable, I drove him to
+the Wellington Road and deposited him with his parents.  I love a
+couple of hours with a child when it is thoroughly happy and on
+its best behaviour.  And the enjoyment is enhanced by the feeling
+of utter thankfulness that he is not my child, but somebody
+else's.
+
+In the evening I read and meditated on the happiness of my lot.
+The years of school drudgery have already lost their sharp edge
+of remembered definition, and sometimes I wonder whether it is I
+who lived through them.  I had not a care in the world, not a
+want that I could not gratify.  I thought of Judith.  I thought
+of Sebastian Pasquale.  I amused myself by seeking a Renaissance
+type of which he must be the reincarnation.  I fixed upon young
+Olgiati, one of the assassins of Gian Galeazzo Sforza.  Of the
+many hundreds of British youths who passed before my eyes during
+my slavery, he is the only one who has sought me out in his
+manhood.  And strange to say we had only a few months together,
+during my first year's apprenticeship to the dismal craft, he
+being in the sixth form, and but three or four years younger than
+I.  He was the maddest, oddest, most diabolical and most
+unpopular boy in the school.  The staff, to whom the conventional
+must of necessity be always the Divine, loathed him.  I alone
+took to the creature.  I think now that my quaint passion for the
+cinquecento Italian must have had something to do with my
+attraction.  In externals he is as English as I am, having been
+brought up in England by an English mother, but there are
+thousands of Hindoos who are more British than he.  The McMurrays
+were telling me dreadful stories about him this afternoon.
+Sighing after an obdurate Viennese dancer, he had lured her
+coachman into helpless intoxication, had invested himself in the
+domestic's livery, and had driven off with the lady in the
+darkness after the performance to the outskirts of the town.
+What happened exactly, the McMurrays did not know; but there was
+the devil to pay in Vienna.  And yet this inconsequent libertine
+did the following before my own eyes.  We were walking down
+Piccadilly together one afternoon in the hard winter of 1894.  It
+was a black frost, agonizingly cold.  A shivering wretch held out
+matches for sale.  His hideous red toes protruded through his
+boots.  "My God, my God!" cried Pasquale, "I can't stand this!"
+He jumped into a crawling hansom, tore off his own boots, flung
+them to the petrified beggar and drove home in his stocking-feet.
+I stood on the curb and, with mingled feelings, watched the
+recipient, amid an interested group of bystanders, match the
+small shapely sole against his huge foot, and with a grin tuck
+the boots under his arm and march away with them to the nearest
+pawnbroker.  If Pasquale had been an equally compassionate
+Briton, he would have stopped to think, and have tossed the man a
+sovereign.  _But he didn't stop to think._  That was my
+cinquecento Pasquale.  And I loved him for it.
+
+I went to bed last night, as I have indicated, the most contented
+of created beings.  I awoke this morning with no greater ruffle
+on my consciousness than the appointment with my lawyers.  The
+sun shone.  A thrush sang lustily in the big elm opposite my
+bedroom windows.  The tree, laughed and shook out its finery at
+me like a woman, saying: "See how green I am, after Sunday's
+rain."  Antoinette's one eyed black cat (a hideous beast) met me
+in the hall and arching its back welcomed me affably to its new
+residence.  And on my breakfast-table I found a copy of the first
+edition of Cristoforo da Costa's "_Elogi delle Donne Illustri_,"
+a book which, in great diffidence, I had asked Lord Carnforth, a
+perfect stranger, to allow me the privilege of consulting in his
+library, and which Lord Carnforth, with a scholar's splendid
+courtesy, had sent me to use at my convenience.
+
+Filled with peace and good-will to all men, like a
+personification of Christmas in May, I started out this morning
+to see my lawyers.  I reached them at three o'clock, having idled
+at second-hand bookstalls and lunched on the road.  I signed
+their unintelligible document, and wandered through the Temple
+Gardens and along the Embankment.  When I had passed under
+Hungerford Bridge, it struck me that I was warm, a little leg-
+weary, and the Victoria Embankment Gardens smiled an invitation
+to repose.  I struck the shady path beneath the terrace of the
+National Liberal Club, and sat myself down on a comfortable
+bench.  The only other occupant was a female in black.  As I take
+no interest in females in black, I disregarded her presence, and
+gave myself up to the contemplation, of the trim lawns and
+flower-beds, the green trees masking the unsightly Surrey side of
+the river, and the back of the statue of Sir Bartle Frere.  A
+continued survey of the last not making for edification (a statue
+that turns its back on you being one of the dullest objects made
+by man), I took from my pocket a brown leather-covered volume
+which I had fished out of a penny box: "_Suite de l'Histoire du
+Gouvernement de Venise ou L'Histoire des Uscoques, par le Sieur
+Houssaie, Amsterdam, MDCCV._"  A whole complete scholarly history
+of a forgotten people for a penny.  The Uscoques were originally
+Dalmatians who settled at Segna on the Adriatic and became the
+most pestiferous colony of pirates and desperadoes of sixteenth
+century Europe.  I opened the yellow-stained pages and savoured
+their acrid musty smell.  How much learning, thought I, bought
+with the heart's-blood, how many million hours of fierce
+intellectual struggle appeal to mankind nowadays but as an odour,
+an odour of decay, in the nostrils of here and there a casual
+student.  I thought this, and my eye caught, repeated many times,
+the name of the Frangipani, once lords of Segna.  As men, their
+achievements are wiped out of commonly remembered history; but
+their name is distilled into a sensuous perfume which perchance
+may be found in the penny scent fountains of to-day.  I was
+smiling over this quaint olfactory coincidence, and wondering
+whether any human being alive at that moment had ever read the
+Sieur Houssaie's book, when a tug at my arm, such as a neglected
+terrier gives with his paw, brought me back to the workaday
+world.  I turned sharply and met a pair of melting, brown,
+piteous, imploring dog's eyes, belonging not to a terrier, but to
+the disregarded female in black.
+
+"Will you please, sir, to tell me what I must do."
+
+I stared.  She was not in the least like what my half-conscious
+glance at the female in black had taken her to be.  She was quite
+young, remarkably good looking.  Even at the first instant I was
+struck by her eyes and the mass of bronze hair and the twitching
+of a childish mouth.  But she had an untidy, touzled, raffish
+appearance, due to I knew not what investiture of disrepute.  Her
+hands--for she wore no gloves--wanted washing.
+
+"What a young girl like yourself must not do," said I, "is to
+enter into conversation with men in public places."
+
+"Then I shall have to die," she said, forlornly, edging away from
+my side.
+
+She had the oddest little foreign accent.  I looked at her again
+more critically, and discovered what it was that made her look so
+disreputable.  She was wearing an old black dress many sizes too
+big for her.  Great pleats of it were secured by pins in
+unexpected places, so that quaint chaos was made of the scheme of
+decoration--black velvet and bugles--on the bodice.
+Instinctively I felt that a middle-aged, fat, second-hand-
+clothes-dealing Jewess had built it many years ago for synagogue
+wear.  On the girlish figure it looked preposterous.
+Preposterous too was her head-gear, an amorphous bonnet trimmed
+in black, with a cheap black feather drooping brokenly.
+
+Her eyes gave me a reproachful glance and turned away again.
+Then she shrugged her shoulders and sniffed.  My mother had a
+housemaid once who always sniffed like that before beginning to
+cry.  My position was untenable.  I could not remain stonily on
+the seat while this grotesquely attired damsel wept; and for the
+life of me I could not get up and leave her.  She looked at me
+again.  Those swimming, pleading eyes were scarcely human.  I
+capitulated.
+
+"Don't cry.  Tell me what I can do for you," I said.
+
+She moved a few inches nearer.
+
+"I want to find Harry," she said; "I have lost him."
+
+"Who's Harry?" I naturally inquired.
+
+"He is to be my husband."
+
+"What's his other name?"
+
+"I have forgotten," she said, spreading out her hands.
+
+"Don't you know any one else in London?" I asked.
+
+She shook her head mournfully.  "And I am getting so hungry."
+
+I suggested that there were restaurants in London.
+
+"But I have no money," she objected.  "No money and nothing at
+all but this." She designated her dress.  "Isn't it ugly?"
+
+"It is decidedly not becoming," I admitted.
+
+"Well, what must I do?  You tell me and I do it.  If you don't
+tell me, I must die."
+
+She leaned back placidly, having thus put upon my shoulders the
+responsibility of her existence.  I did not know which to admire
+more, her cool assurance or the stoic fortitude with which she
+faced dissolution.
+
+"I can give you some money to keep you going for a day or two,"
+said I, "but as for finding Harry, without knowing his name--"
+
+"After all I don't want so very much to find him," said this
+amazing young person.  "He made me stay in my cabin all the time
+I was in the steamer.  At first I was glad, for it went up and
+down, side to side, and I thought I would die, for I was so sick;
+but afterwards I got better--"
+
+"But where did you come from?" I asked.
+
+"From Alexandretta."
+
+"What were you doing there?"
+
+"I used to sit in a tree and look over the wall--"
+
+"What wall?"
+
+"The wall of my house-my father's house.  He was not my father,
+but he married my mother.  I am English."  She announced the fact
+with a little air of finality.
+
+"Indeed?" said I.
+
+"Yes.  Father, mother--both English.  He was Vice-Consul.  He
+died before I was born.  Then his friend Hamdi Effendi took my
+mother and married her.  You see?"
+
+I confessed I did not.  "Where does Harry come in?" I inquired.
+
+She looked puzzled.  "Come in?" she echoed.
+
+I perceived her knowledge of the English vernacular was limited.
+I turned my question differently.
+
+"Oh," she said with more animation.  "He used to pass by the
+wall, and I talked to him when there was no one looking.  He was
+so pretty--prettier than you," she paused.
+
+"Is it possible?" I said, ironically.
+
+"Oh, yes," she replied with profound gravity.  "He had a
+moustache, but he was not so long."
+
+"Well?  You talked to Harry.  What then?"
+
+In her artless way she told me.  A refreshing story, as old as
+the crusades, with the accessories of orthodox tradition; a
+European disguise, purchased at a slop dealer's by the precious
+Harry, a rope, a midnight flitting, a passage taken on board an
+English ship; the anchor weighed; and the lovers were free on the
+bounding main.  A most refreshing story!  I put on a sudden air
+of sternness, and shot a question at her like a bullet.
+
+"Are you making all this up, young woman?"
+
+She started-looked quite scared.
+
+"You mean I tell lies?  But no.  It is all true.  Why shouldn't
+it be true?  How else could I have come here?"
+
+The question was unanswerable.  Her story was as preposterous as
+her garments.  But her garments were real enough.  I looked long
+into her great innocent eyes.  Yes, she was telling me the truth.
+She babbled on for a little.  I gathered that her step-father,
+Hamdi Effendi, was a Turkish official.  She had spent all her
+life in the harem from which she had eloped with this pretty
+young Englishman.
+
+"And what must I do?" she reiterated.
+
+I told her to give me time.  One is not in the habit of meeting
+abducted Lights of the Harem in the Embankment Gardens, beneath
+the National Liberal Club.  It was, in fact, a bewildering
+occurrence.  I looked around me.  Nothing seemed to have happened
+during the last ten minutes.  A pale young man on the next bench,
+whom I had noticed when I entered, was reading a dirty pink
+newspaper.  Pigeons and sparrows hopped about unconcernedly.  On
+the file of cabs, just perceptible through the foliage, the
+cabmen lolled in listless attitudes.  Sir Bartle Frere stolidly
+kept his back to me, not the least interested in this Gilbert a
+Becket story.  I always thought something was wrong with that
+man's character.
+
+What on earth could I tell her to do?  The best course was to
+find the infernal Harry.  I asked her how she came to lose him.
+It appears he escorted her ashore at Southampton, after having
+scarcely set eyes on her during the voyage, put her into a
+railway carriage with strict injunctions not to stir until he
+claimed her, and then disappeared into space.
+
+"Did he give you your ticket?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What a young blackguard!" I exclaimed.
+
+"I don't like him at all," she said.
+
+How she managed to elude the ticket collector at Vauxhall I could
+not exactly discover.  Apparently she told him, in her confiding
+manner, that Harry had it, and when he found no Harry in the
+train and came back to say so, she turned her dewy imploring eyes
+on him and the sentimental varlet melted.  At Waterloo a man had
+told her
+she must get out of the carriage--she had travelled alone in it
+--and she had meekly obeyed.  She had wandered out of the station
+and across a bridge and had eventually found herself in the
+Embankment Gardens.  Then she had asked me how to find Harry.
+Really she was ridiculously like Thomas a Becket's Saracen mother
+crying in London for Gilbert.  And the most ludicrous part of the
+resemblance was that she did not know the creature's surname.
+
+"By the way," said I, "what is your name?"
+
+"Carlotta."
+
+"Carlotta what?  " I asked.
+
+"I have no other name."
+
+"Your father--the Vice-Consul--had one."
+
+She wrinkled her young forehead in profound mental effort.
+
+"Ramsbotham," she said at last, triumphantly.
+
+"Now look here, Miss Ramsbotham--no," I broke off.  "Such an
+appellation is anachronistic, incongruous, and infinitely absurd.
+I can't use it.  I must take the liberty of addressing you as
+Carlotta."
+
+"But I've told you that Carlotta is my name," she said, in
+uncomprehending innocence.
+
+"And mine is Sir Marcus Ordeyne.  People call me 'Sir Marcus.'"
+
+"Seer Marcous," said Carlotta.
+
+She did not seem at all impressed with the fact that she was
+talking to a member of the baronetage.
+
+"Quite so," said I.  "Now, Carlotta," I resumed, "our first plan
+is to set out in search of Harry.  He may have missed his train,
+and have followed by a later one, and be even now rampaging about
+Waterloo station.  If we hear nothing of him, I will drive you to
+the Turkish Consulate, give you in charge there, and they will
+see you safely home to Alexandretta.  The good Hamdi Effendi is
+doubtless distracted, and will welcome you back with open
+
+arms."
+
+I meant to be urbane and friendly.
+
+She rose to her feet, grew as white as paper, opened her great
+eyes, opened her baby mouth, and in the middle of the Embankment
+Gardens plumped on her knees before me and clasped her hands
+above her head.
+
+"For God's sake get up!" I shrieked, wrenching her back
+acrobatically to the bench beside me.  "You mustn't do things
+like that.  You'll have the whole of London running to look at
+us."
+
+Indeed the sight had so far roused the pale young man from his
+lethargy that he laid his dirty pink paper on his knees.  I kept
+hold of Carlotta's wrists.  She began to moan incoherently.
+
+"You mustn't send me back--Hamdi will kill me--oh please don't
+send me back--he will make me marry his friend Mustapha--Mustapha
+has only two teeth--and he is seventy years old--and he has a
+wife already--I only went with Harry to avoid Mustapha.  Hamdi
+would kill me, he would beat me, he would make me marry
+Mustapha."
+
+That is what I gathered from her utterances.  She was frightened
+out of her wits, even into anticlimax.
+
+"But the Turkish Consul is your natural protector," said I.
+
+"You wouldn't be so cruel," she sobbed.  The guttural sonority
+with which she rolled the "r" in "cruel" made the epithet appear
+one of revolting barbarity.  She fixed those confounded eyes upon
+me.
+
+I wonder whether such a fool as I has ever lived.
+
+I promised, on my honour, not to hand her over to the Turkish
+consulate.
+
+I took a four-wheeled cab from the rank on the Embankment and
+drove her to Waterloo.  On the way she reminded me that she was
+hungry.  I gave her food at the buffet.  It appears she has a
+passion for hard-boiled eggs and lemonade.  She did not seem very
+much concerned about finding Harry, but chattered to me about the
+appointments of the bar.  The beer-pulls amused her particularly.
+She made me order a glass of bitter (a beverage which I loathe)
+in order to see again how it was done, and broke into gleeful
+laughter.  The smart but unimaginative barmaid stared at her in
+bewilderment.  The two or three bar-loafers also stared.  I was
+glad to escape to the platform.
+
+There, however, a group of idlers followed us about and stood in
+a ring round us when we stopped to interview a railway official.
+The beautiful, bronze-haired, ox-eyed young woman in her
+disreputable attire--I have never seen a broken black feather
+waggle more shamelessly--was a sight indeed to strike wonderment
+into the cockney mind.  And perhaps her association with myself
+added to the incongruity.  I am long and lean and unlovely, I
+know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably
+respectable.  Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by
+the public attention.  "Calm and unembarrassed as a fate" she
+returned the popular gaze, and appeared somewhat bored by my
+efforts to find Harry.  In the midst of an earnest discussion
+with the station-master she begged me for a penny to put into
+an automatic sweetmeat machine, which she had seen a small
+boy work successfully.  I refused, curtly, and turned to the
+station-master.  A roar of laughter interrupted me again.
+Carlotta, with outstretched hand and pleading eyes, like an
+organ-grinder's monkey, had induced the boy to part with the
+sticky bit of toffee, and was in the act of conveying it to
+her mouth.
+
+"I'll call to-morrow morning," said I hurriedly to the
+station-master.  "If the gentleman should come meanwhile,
+tell him to leave his name and address."
+
+Then I took Carlotta by the arm and, accompanied by my train of
+satellites, I thrust her into the first hansom-cab I could see.
+
+There was no sign or token of Harry.  No pretty young man was
+hanging dejectedly about the station.  None had torn his hair
+before the officials asking for news of a lost female in frowsy
+black.  There was no Harry.  There was no further need therefore
+to afford the British public a gratuitous entertainment.
+
+"Drive," said I to the cabman.  "Drive like the devil."
+
+"Where to, sir?"
+
+I gasped.  Where should I drive?  I lost my head.
+
+"Go on driving round and round till I tell you to stop."  The
+philosophic cabman did not regard me as eccentric, for he whipped
+up his horse cheerfully.  When we had slid down the steep incline
+and got free of the precincts of that hateful station, I breathed
+more freely and collected my wits.  Carlotta sucked her sticky
+thumbs and wiped them on her dress.
+
+"Where are we going?" she asked.
+
+"Across Waterloo Bridge," said I.
+
+"What to do?"
+
+"To dispose of you somehow," I replied, grimly.  "But how, I
+haven't a notion.  There's a Home for Lost Dogs and a Home for
+Stray Cats, and a Lost Property Office at Scotland Yard, but as
+you are neither a dog nor a cat nor an umbrella, these refuges
+are unavailable."
+
+The cab reached the Strand.
+
+"East or west, sir?" inquired the driver.
+
+"West," said I, at random.
+
+We drove down the Strand at a leisurely pace.  I passed through a
+phase of agonised thought.  By my side was a helpless, homeless,
+friendless, penniless young woman, as beautiful as a goddess and
+as empty-minded as a baby.  What in the world could I do with
+her?  I looked at her in despair.  She met my glance with a
+contented smile; just as if we were old acquaintances and I were
+taking her out to dinner.  The unfamiliar roar and bustle of
+London impressed her no more than it would have impressed a
+little dog who had found a kind master.
+
+"Suppose I gave you some money and put you down here and left
+you?" I inquired.
+
+"I should die," she answered, fatalistically.  "Or, perhaps, I
+should find another kind gentleman."
+
+"I wonder if you have such a thing as a soul," said I.
+
+She plucked at her gown.  "I have only this--and it is very
+ugly," she remarked again.  "I should like a pink dress."
+
+We crossed Trafalgar Square, and I saw by Big Ben that it was a
+quarter to six.  I could not drive through London with her for an
+indefinite period.  Besides, my half past seven dinner awaited
+me.
+
+Why, oh, why has Judith gone to Paris?  Had she been in town I
+could have shot Carlotta into Tottenham Mansions, and gone home
+to my dinner and Cristoforo da Costa with a light heart.  Judith
+would have found Carlotta vastly entertaining.  She would have
+washed her body and analysed her temperament.  But Judith was in
+retreat with Delphine Carrere, and has left me alone to bear the
+responsibilities of life--and Carlotta.
+
+The cab slowly mounted Waterloo Place.  I had thought of my aunts
+as possible helpers, and rejected the idea.  I had thought of a
+police station, a hotel, my lawyers (too late), a furnished
+lodging, a hospital.  My mind was an aching blank.
+
+"Where do you live?" asked Carlotta.
+
+I looked at her and groaned.  It was the only solution.  "Up
+Regent's Park way," I replied, aware that she was none the wiser
+for the information.
+
+I gave the address to the cabman through the trap-door in the
+roof.
+
+"I'm going to take you home with me for to-night," I said,
+severely.  "I have an excellent French housekeeper who will look
+after your comfort.  And to-morrow if that infernal young
+scoundrel of a lover of yours is not found, it will not be the
+fault of the police force of Great Britain."
+
+She laid her grubby little hand on mine.  It was very soft and
+cool.
+
+"You are cross with me.  Why?"
+
+I removed her hand.
+
+"You mustn't do that again," said I.  "No; I am not in the least
+cross with you.  But I hope you are aware that this event is of
+an unprecedented character."
+
+"What is an unprecedented character?" she asked, stumbling over
+the long words.
+
+"A thing that has never happened before and I devoutly hope will
+not happen again."
+
+Her face was turned to me.  The lower lip trembled a little.  The
+dog-look came into those wonderful eyes.
+
+"You will be kind to me?" she said, in her childish
+monosyllables, each word carefully articulated with a long pause
+between.
+
+I felt I had behaved like a heartless brute, ever since I thrust
+her into the cab at Waterloo.  I relented and laughed.
+
+"If you are a good girl and do as I tell you," said I.
+
+"Seer Marcous is my lord and I am his slave," was her astounding
+reply.
+
+Then I realised that she had been brought up by Hamdi Effendi.
+There is something salutary, after all, in the training of the
+harem.
+
+"I'm very glad to hear it," I said.
+
+She closed her eyes.  I saw now she was very tired.  I thought
+she had gone to sleep and I looked in front of me puzzling out
+the problem.  Presently the cab-doors were thrust violently open,
+and if I had net held her back, she would have jumped out of the
+vehicle.
+
+"Look!" she cried, in great excitement.  "There!  There's Harry's
+name!"
+
+She pointed to a butcher's cart immediately in front of us,
+bearing, in large letters, the name of "E. Robinson."
+
+"We must stop," she went on.  "He will tell us about Harry."
+
+It took me from Oxford Circus to Portman Square to convince her
+that there were many thousands of Robinsons in London and that
+the probability of the butcher's cart being a clue to Harry's
+whereabouts was exceedingly remote.
+
+At Baker Street station she asked, wearily: "Is it still far to
+your house?"
+
+"No," said I, encouragingly.  "Not very far."
+
+"But one can drive for many days through streets in London, and
+there will be still streets, still houses?  So they tell me in
+Alexandretta.  London is as big as the moon, not so?"
+
+I felt absurdly pleased.  She was capable of an idea.  I had
+begun to wonder whether she were not merely half-witted.  The
+fact of her being able to read had already cheered me.
+
+"Many hours, yes," I corrected, "not many days.  London seems big
+to you?"
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, passing her hand over her eyes.  "It makes
+all go round in my head.  One day you will take me for a drive
+through these wonderful streets.  Now I am too tired.  They make
+my head ache."
+
+Then she shut her eyes again and did not open them until we
+stopped at Lingfield Terrace.  I modified my first impression of
+her animal unimpressionability.  She is quite sane.  If Boadicea
+were to be brought back to life and be set down suddenly at
+Charing Cross, her psychological condition would not be far
+removed from that of an idiot.  Yet in her own environment
+Boadicea was quite a sane and capable lady.
+
+My admirable man Stenson opened the door and admitted us without
+moving a muscle.  He would betray no incorrect astonishment if I
+brought home a hippogriff to dinner.  I have an admiration for
+the trained serving-man's imperturbability.  It is the guardian
+angel of his self-respect.  I ordered him to send Antoinette to
+me in the drawing-room.
+
+"Antoinette," said I, "this young lady has travelled all the way
+from Asia Minor, where the good St. Paul had so many adventures,
+without changing her things."
+
+_C'est y Dieu possible_!" said Antoinette.
+
+"Give her a nice hot bath, and perhaps you will have the kindness
+to lend her the underlinen that your sex is in the habit of
+wearing.  You will put her into the spare bedroom, as she is
+going to pass the night here, and you will look generally after
+her comfort."
+
+"_Bien, M'sieu_," said Antoinette, regarding Carlotta in
+stupefaction.
+
+"And put that hat and dress into the dust-bin."
+
+"_Bien, M'sieu._"
+
+"And as Mademoiselle is broken with fatigue, having come without
+stopping from Asia Minor, she will go to bed as soon as
+possible."
+
+"The poor angel," said Antoinette.  "But will she not join
+Monsieur at dinner?"
+
+"I think not," said I, dryly.
+
+"But the young ducklings that are roasting for the dinner of
+Monsieur?"
+
+"If they were not roasting they might be growing up into ducks,"
+said I.
+
+"Oh, la, la!" murmured Antoinette, below her breath.
+
+"Carlotta," said I, turning to the girl who had seated herself
+humbly on a straight-backed chair, "you will go with Antoinette
+and do as she tells you.  She doesn't talk English, but she is
+used to making people understand her."
+
+"_Mais, moi parley Francais un peu_," said Carlotta.
+
+"Then you will win Antoinette's heart, and she will lend you her
+finest.  Good-night," said I, abruptly.  "I hope you will have a
+pleasant rest."
+
+She took my outstretched hand, and, to my great embarrassment,
+raised it to her lips.  Antoinette looked on, with a sentimental
+moisture in her eyes.
+
+"The poor angel," she repeated.
+
+Later, I gave Stenson a succinct account of what had occurred.  I
+owed it to my reputation.  Then I went upstairs and dressed for
+dinner.  I consider I owe that to Stenson.  It was eight o'clock
+before I sat down, but Antoinette's ducklings were delicious and
+brought consolation for the upheaval of the day.  I was unfolding
+the latest edition of _The Westminster Gazette_ with which I
+always soothe the digestive half-hour after dinner, when
+Antoinette entered to report progress.
+
+She was sound asleep, the poor little one.  Oh, but she was
+tired.  She had eaten some _consomme_, a bit of fish and an
+omelette.  But she was beautiful, gentle as a lamb; and she had a
+skin _on dirait du satin_.  Had not Monsieur noticed it?
+
+I replied, with some over-emphasis, that I had not.
+
+"Monsieur rather regards the inside of his books," said
+Antoinette.
+
+"They are generally more worth regarding," said I.
+
+Antoinette said nothing; but there was a feminine quiver at the
+corners of her fat lips.
+
+She was comfortably disposed of for the night.  I drew a breath
+of relief.  To-morrow Great Scotland Yard should set out on the
+track of the absconding Harry.  Carlotta's happy recollection of
+his surname facilitated the search.  I lit a cigarette and opened
+_The Westminster Gazette_.
+
+A few moments later I was staring at the paper in blank horror
+and dismay.
+
+Harry was found.  There was no mistake.  Harry Robinson, junior
+partner of the firm of Robinson & Co., of Mincing Lane.  Vain,
+indeed, would it be to seek the help of Great Scotland Yard.
+Harry had blown out his brains in the South Western Hotel at
+Southampton.
+
+
+I have read the newspaper paragraph over and over again to-night.
+There is no possible room for doubt that it is the same Harry.
+
+The ways of man are past interpretation.  Here is an individual
+who lures a girl from an oriental harem, attires her in
+disgusting garments, smuggles her on board a steamer, where he
+claps her, so to speak, under hatches, and has little if anything
+to do with her, sets her penniless and ticketless in a London
+train, and then goes off and blows his brains out.  Where is the
+sense of it?
+
+I have not a spark of sympathy for Harry--a callow, egotistical
+dealer in currants.  He ought to have blown out his brains a year
+ago.  He has behaved in a most unconscionable manner.  How does he
+expect me to break the news to Carlotta?  His selfishness is
+appalling.  There he lies, comfortably dead in the South Western
+Hotel, while Carlotta has literally not a rag to her back, her
+horrific belongings having been dropped into the dust-bin.  Who
+does he think is going to provide Carlotta with food and shelter
+and a pink dress?  What does he imagine is to become of the poor
+waif?  In all my life I have never heard of a more cynical
+suicide.
+
+I have walked about for hours, laughing and cursing and kicking
+the binding loose of my precious Muratori.  I have wondered
+whether the universe or I were mad.  For there is one thing that
+is clear to me--Carlotta is here, and here Carlotta must remain.
+
+Devastating though it be to the well-ordered quietude of my life,
+I must adopt Carlotta.
+
+There is no way out of it.
+
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER IV
+
+
+May 25th.
+
+Shall I be accused of harbouring a bevy of odalisques at No. 20
+Lingfield Terrace?  Calumny and Exaggeration walk abroad, arm in
+arm, even on the north side of Regent's Park.  If they had spied
+Carlotta at my window this morning, they would have looked in for
+afternoon tea at my Aunt Jessica's and have waylaid Mrs. Ralph
+Ordeyne outside the Oratory.  The question is: Shall Truth
+anticipate them?  I think not.  Every family has its
+irrepressible, impossible, unpractical member, its _enfant
+terrible_, who is forever doing the wrong thing with the best
+intentions.  Truth is the _enfant terrible_ of the Virtues.  Some
+times it puts them to the blush and throws them into confusion;
+at others it blusters like a blatant liar; at others, again, it
+stutters and stammers like a detected thief.  There is no knowing
+how Truth may behave, so I shall not let it visit my relations.
+
+I must confess, however, that I feared the possible passing by of
+the two decrepit cronies, when Carlotta stood at my open French
+window this morning.  She is really indecently beautiful.  She
+was wearing a deep red silk peignoir, open at the throat,
+unashamedly Parisian, which clung to every salient curve of her
+figure.  I wondered where, in the name of morality, she had
+procured the garment.  I learned later that it was the joy and
+pride of Antoinette's existence; for once, in the days long ago,
+when she was _femme de chambre_ to a luminary of the cafes
+concerts, it had met around her waist.  She had treasured the
+cast-off finery of this burned-out star--she beamed in the
+seventies--for all these years, and now its immortal devilry
+transfigured Carlotta.  She was also washed specklessly clean.
+An aroma that no soap or artificial perfume could give disengaged
+itself from her as she moved.  Her gold-bronze hair was superbly
+ordered.  I noticed her arms which the sleeves of the gay garment
+left bare to the elbows; the skin was like satin.  "_Et sa peau!
+On dirait du satin._"  Confound Antoinette!  She had the
+audacity, too, to come down with bare feet.  It was a revelation
+of pink, undreamed-of loveliness in tus.
+
+I repeat she is indecently beautiful.  A chit of a girl of
+eighteen (for that I learn is her age) has no right to flaunt the
+beauty that should be the appanage of the woman of seven and
+twenty.  She should be modestly well-favoured, as becomes her
+childish stage of development.  She looked incongruous among my
+sober books, and I regarded her with some resentment.  I dislike
+the exotic.  I prefer geraniums to orchids.  I have a row of pots
+of the former on my balcony, and the united efforts of Stenson,
+Antoinette, and myself have not yet succeeded in making them
+bloom; but I love the unassuming velvety leaves.  Carlotta is a
+flaring orchid and produces on my retina a sensation of disquiet.
+
+
+I broke the tidings of the tragedy as gently as I could.  I had
+news of Harry, I said, gravely.  She merely looked interested and
+asked me when he was coming.
+
+"I'm afraid he will never come," said I.
+
+"If he does not come, then I can stay here with you?"
+
+Her eyes betrayed a quiver of anxiety.  For the life of me I
+could not avoid the ironical.
+
+"If you will condescend to dwell as a member of my family beneath
+my humble roof."
+
+The irony was lost on her.  She uttered a joyous little cry and
+held out both her hands to me.  Her eyes danced.
+
+"Oh, I am glad he is not coming.  I don't like him any more.  I
+love to stay here with you."
+
+I took both the hands in mine.  Mortal man could not have done
+otherwise.
+
+"Have you thought why it is that you will never see Harry again?"
+
+She shook her beautiful head and held it to one side and puckered
+up her brows, like a wistful terrier.
+
+"Is he dead?"
+
+"Would it grieve you, if he were?"
+
+"No-o," she replied, thoughtfully.
+
+"Then," said I, dropping her hands and turning away, "Harry is
+dead."
+
+She stood silent for a couple of minutes, regarding the row of
+pink toes that protruded beneath the peignoir.  At last her bosom
+shook with a sigh.  She glanced up at me sweetly.
+
+"I am so glad," she said.
+
+
+That is all she has vouchsafed to say with regard to the unhappy
+young man.  "She was so glad!"  She has not even asked how he met
+his death.  She has simply accepted my statement.  Harry is dead.
+He has gone out of her life like yesterday's sunshine or
+yesterday's frippery.  If I had told her that yesterday's cab-
+horse had broken his neck, she could not be more unconcerned.
+Nay, she is glad.  Harry had not treated her nicely.  He had
+boxed her up in a cabin where she had been sick, and had
+subjected her to various other discomforts.  I, on the contrary,
+had surrounded her with luxuries and dressed her in red silk.
+She rather dreaded Harry's coming.  When she learned that this
+was improbable she was relieved.  His death had turned the
+improbable into the impossible.  It was the end of the matter.
+She was so glad!
+
+Yet there must have been some tender passage in their brief
+intercourse.  He must have kissed her during their flight from
+home to steamer.  Her young pulses must have throbbed a little
+faster at the sight of his comely face.
+
+What kind of a mythological being am I housing?  Did she come at
+all out of Hamdi Effendi's harem?  Is she not rather some strange
+sea-creature that clambered on board the vessel and bewitched the
+miserable boy, sucked the soul out of him, and drove him to
+destruction?  Or is she a Vampire?  Or a Succubus?  Or a
+Hamadryad?  Or a Salamander?
+
+One thing, I vow she is not human.
+
+If only Judith were here to advise me!  And yet I have an uneasy
+feeling that Judith will suggest, with a certain violence that is
+characteristic of her, the one course which I cannot follow: to
+send Carlotta back to Hamdi Effendi.  But I cannot break my word.
+I would rather, far rather, break Carlotta's beautiful neck.
+I have not written to Judith.  Nor, by the way, have I received a
+letter from her.  Delphine has been whirling her off her legs,
+and she is ashamed to confess the delusion of the sequestered
+life.  I wish I were enjoying myself half as much as Judith.
+
+
+"I have adopted Mademoiselle," said I to Antoinette this morning.
+"If she returned to Asia Minor they would put a string round her
+neck, tie her up in a sack, and throw her into the sea."
+
+"That would be a pity," said Antoinette, warmly.
+
+"_Cela depend_," said I.  "Anyhow she is here, and here she
+remains."
+
+"In that case," said Antoinette, "has Monsieur considered that
+the poor angel will need clothes and articles of toilette--and
+this and that and the other?"
+
+"And shoes  to hide her shameless tus," I said.
+
+"They are the most beautiful toes I have ever seen!" cried
+Antoinette in imbecile admiration.  She has bewitched that old
+woman already.
+
+I put on my hat and went to Wellington Road to consult Mrs.
+McMurray.  Heaven be thanked, thought I, for letting me take her
+little boy the day before yesterday to see the other animals, and
+thus winning a mother's heart.  She will help me out of my
+dilemma.  Unfortunately she was not alone.  Her husband, who is
+on the staff of a morning newspaper, was breakfasting when I
+arrived.  He is a great ruddy bearded giant with a rumbling
+thunder of a laugh like the bass notes of an organ.  His
+assertion of the masculine principle in brawn and beard and bass
+somewhat overpowers a non-muscular, clean-shaven, and tenor
+person like myself.  Mrs. McMurray, on the contrary, is a small,
+bright bird of a woman.
+
+I told my amazing story from beginning to end, interrupted by
+many Hoo-oo-oo-oo's from McMurray.
+
+"You may laugh," said I, "but to have a mythical being out of
+Olympiodorus quartered on you for life is no jesting matter."
+
+Olymp--?" began McMurray.
+
+"Yes," I snapped.
+
+"Bring her this afternoon, Sir Marcus, when this unsympathetic
+wretch has gone to his club," said his wife, "and I'll take her
+out shopping."
+
+"But, dear lady," I cried in despair, "she has but one garment
+--and that a silk dressing-gown of horrible depravity that
+belonged to a dancer of the second Empire!  She is also barefoot."
+
+"Then I'll come round myself and see what can be done."
+
+"And by Jove, so will I!" cried McMurray.
+
+"You'll do such  thing," said his wife
+
+"If I gave you a cheque for  100," said I, "do you think you
+could get her what she wants, to go on with?"
+
+"A hundred pounds!"  The little lady uttered a delighted gasp and
+I thought she would have kissed me.  McMurray brought his
+sledgehammer of a hand down on my shoulder.
+
+"Man!" he roared.  "Do you know what you are doing--casting a
+respectable wife and mother of a family loose among London
+drapery shops with a hundred pounds in her pocket?  Do you think
+she will henceforward give a thought to her home or husband?  Do
+you want to ruin my domestic peace, drive me to drink, and wreck
+my household?"
+
+"If you do that again," said I, rubbing my shoulder, "I'll give
+her two hundred."
+
+When I returned Carlotta was sitting, Turkish fashion, on a sofa,
+smoking a cigarette (to which she had helped herself out of my
+box) and turning over the pages of a book.  This sign of literary
+taste surprised me.  But I soon found it was the second volume of
+my _edition de luxe_ of Louandre's _Les Arts Somptuaires_, to
+whose place on the shelves sheer feminine instinct must have
+guided her.  I announced Mrs. McMurray's proposed visit.  She
+jumped to her feet, ravished at the prospect, and sent my
+beautiful book (it is bound in tree-calf and contains a couple of
+hundred exquisitely coloured plates) flying onto the floor.  I
+picked it up tenderly, and laid it on my writing-table.
+
+"Carlotta," said I, "the first thing you have to learn here is
+that books in England are more precious than babies in
+Alexandretta.  If you pitch them about in this fashion you will
+murder them and I shall have you hanged."
+
+This checked her sumptuary excitement.  It gave her food for
+reflection, and she stood humbly penitent, while I went further
+into the subject of clothes.
+
+"In fact," I concluded, "you will be dressed like a lady." She
+opened the book at a gaudy picture, "_France, XVI(ieme)
+Siecle--Saltimbanque et Bohemmienne_," and pointed to the female
+mountebank.  This young person wore a bright green tunic,
+bordered with gold and finished off at the elbows and waist with
+red, over an undergown of flaring pink, the sleeves of which
+reached her wrist; she was crowned with red and white carnations
+stuck in ivy.
+
+"I will get a dress like that," said Carlotta.
+
+I wondered how far Mrs. McMurray possessed the colour-sense, and
+I trembled.  I tried to explain gently to Carlotta the
+undesirability of such a costume for outdoor wear in London; but
+with tastes there is no disputing, and I saw that she was but
+half-convinced.  She will require training in aesthetics.
+
+She is very submissive.  I said, "Run away now to Antoinette,"
+and she went with the cheerfulness of a child.  I must rig up a
+sitting-room for her, as I cannot have her in here.  Also for the
+present she must take her meals in her own apartments.  I cannot
+shock the admirable Stenson by sitting down at table with her in
+that improper peignoir.  Besides, as Antoinette informs me, the
+poor lamb eats meat with her fingers, after the fashion of the
+East.  I know what that is, having once been present at an
+Egyptian dinner-party in Cairo, and pulled reeking lumps of flesh
+out of the leg of mutton.  Ugh!  But as she has probably not sat
+down to a meal with a man in her life, her banishment from my
+table will not hurt her feelings.  She must, however, be trained
+in Christian table-manners, as well as in aesthetics; also in a
+great many other things.
+
+
+Mrs. McMurray arrived with a tape-measure, a pencil, and a
+notebook.
+
+"First," she announced, "I will measure her all over.  Then I
+will go out and procure her a set of out-door garments, and
+tomorrow we will spend the whole livelong day in the shops.  Do
+you mind if I use part of the  100 for the hire of a private
+brougham?"
+
+"Have a coach and six, my dear Mrs. McMurray," I said.  "It will
+doubtless please Carlotta better."
+
+I summoned Carlotta and performed the ceremony of introduction.
+To my surprise she was perfectly at her ease and with the
+greatest courtesy of manner invited the visitor to accompany her
+to her own apartments.
+
+When Mrs. McMurray returned to the drawing-room she wore an
+expression that can only be described as indescribable.
+
+"What, my dear Sir Marcus, do you think is to be the ultimate
+destiny of that young person?"
+
+"She shall learn type-writing," said I, suddenly inspired, "and
+make a fair copy of my Renaissance Morals."
+
+"She would make a very fair copy indeed of Renaissance Morals,"
+returned the lady, dryly.
+
+"Is she so very dreadful?" I asked in alarm.  "The peignoir, I
+know--"
+
+"Perhaps that has something to do with it."
+
+"Then, for heaven's sake," said I, "dress her in drabs and greys
+and subfusc browns.  Cut off her hair and give her a row of
+buttons down the back."
+
+My friend's eyes sparkled.
+
+"I am going," said she, "to have the day of my life tomorrow."
+
+
+Carlotta had already gone to sleep, so Antoinette informed me,
+when the results of Mrs. McMurray's shopping came home.  I am
+glad she has early habits.  It appears she has spent a happy and
+fully occupied afternoon over a pile of French illustrated comic
+papers in the possession of my excellent housekeeper.
+
+I wonder whether it is quite judicious to make French comic
+papers her initiation into the ideas of Western civilisation.
+Into this I must inquire.  I must also talk seriously to her with
+a view to her ultimate destiny.  But as my view would be
+distorted by the red dressing-gown, I shall wait until she is
+decently clad.  I think I shall have to set apart certain hours
+of the day for instructive conversation with Carlotta.  I shall
+have to develop her mind, of which she distinctly has the
+rudiments.  For the rest of the day she must provide entertainment
+out of her own resources.  This her oriental habits of
+seclusion will render an easy task, for I will wager that
+Hamdi Effendi did not concern himself greatly as to the way in
+which the ladies of his harem filled up their time.  And now I
+come to think of it, he certainly did not allow Carlotta to
+sprawl about his own private and particular drawing-room.  I will
+not westernise her too rapidly.  The Turkish educational system
+has its merits.
+
+This, in its way is comforting.  If only I could accept her as a
+human creature.  But when I think of her callous reception of the
+tidings of the unhappy boy's death, my spirit fails me.  Such a
+being would run a carving-knife into you, as you slept, without
+any compunction, and when you squeaked, she would laugh.  Look at
+her base ingratitude to the good Hamdi Effendi, who took her in
+before she was born and has treated her as a daughter all her
+life.  No: her spiritual attitude all through has been that of
+the ladies who used to visit St. Anthony--in the leisure moments
+when they were not actively engaged in temptation.  I don't
+believe her father was an English vice-consul.  He was Satan.
+
+I wonder what she told Mrs. McMurray.
+
+I have been thinking over the matter to-night.  The good lady was
+wrong.  Whatever were the morals of the Renaissance,
+personalities were essentially positive.  They were devilishly
+wicked or angelically good.  There was nothing _rosse_, non-moral
+about the Renaissance Italian.  The women were strongly tempered.
+I love to believe the story told by Machiavelli and Muratori of
+Catherine Sforza in the citadel of Forli.  "Surrender or we slay
+your children which we hold as hostages," cried the besiegers.
+"Kill them if you like.  I can breed more to avenge them."  It is
+the speech of a giant nature.  It awakens something enthusiastic
+within me; although such a lady would be an undesirable helpmeet
+for a mild mannered man like myself.
+
+And then again there is Bonna, the woman for whose career I
+desired to consult the prime authority Cristoforo da Costa.  I
+have been sketching her into my chapter tonight.  Here is a
+peasant girl caught up to his saddle-bow by a condottiere,
+Brunoro, during some village raid.  She fights like a soldier by
+his side.  He is imprisoned in Valencia by Alfonso of Naples,
+languishes in a dungeon for ten years.  And for ten years Bonna
+goes from court to court in Europe and from prince to prince,
+across seas and mountains, unwearying, unyielding, with the
+passion of heaven in her heart and the courage of hell in her
+soul, urging and soliciting her man's release.  After ten long
+years she succeeds.  And then they are married.  What were her
+tumultuous feelings as she stood by that altar?  The old
+historian does not say; but the very glory of God must have
+flooded her being when, in the silence of the bare church, the
+little bell tinkled to tell her that the Host was raised, and her
+love was made blessed for all eternity.  And then she goes  away
+with him and fights in the old way by his side for fifteen years.
+When he is killed, she languishes and dies within the year.
+Porcelli sees them in 1455.  Brunoro, an old, squinting,
+paralysed man.  Bonna, a little shrivelled, yellow old woman,
+with a quiver on her shoulder, a bow in her hand; her grey hair
+is covered by a helmet and she wears great military boots.  The
+picture is magical.  There is infinite pathos in the sight of the
+two withered, crippled, grotesque forms from which all the
+glamour of manhood and beauty have departed, and infinite awe in
+the thought of the holy communion of the unconquerable and
+passionate souls.  I wonder it has not come down to us as one of
+the great love-stories of the world.
+
+Elements such as these sway the Morals of the Renaissance.
+
+But I am taking Mrs. McMurray too seriously; and it is really not
+a bad idea to have Carlotta taught type-writing.
+
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER V
+
+
+May 26th.
+
+This morning a letter from Judith.
+
+"Do not laugh at me," she writes.  "The road to Paris is paved
+with good intentions.  I really could not help it.  Delphine put
+her great arm round my would-be sequestered and meditative self
+and carried it off bodily, and here it is in the midst of
+lunches, picture-shows, dinners, suppers, theatres and dances;
+and if you laugh, you will make me humiliated when I confess that
+it is thoroughly enjoying itself."
+
+Laugh at her, dear woman?  I am only too glad that she can fling
+her Winter Garment of Repentance into the Fires of Paris
+Springtide.  She has little enough enjoyment in friendless
+London.  Fill your heart with it, my dear, and lay up a store for
+use in the dull months to come.  For my part, however, I am
+content to be beyond the reach of Delphine's great arm.  I must
+write to Judith.  I shall have to explain Carlotta; but for that
+I think I shall wait until she becomes a little more explicable.
+In dealing with women it is well to employ discrimination.  You
+are never quite sure whether they are not merely simple geese or
+the most complex of created beings.  Perhaps they are such a
+curious admixture that you cannot tell at a given moment which
+side, the simple or the complex, you are touching.  May not there
+be the deepest of all allegories in Eve standing midway between
+the innocent apple and the guileful serpent?  I shall have to see
+more of Carlotta before I can safely explain her to Judith.
+
+At any rate she is no longer attired like an odalisque of the
+Second Empire, and Mrs. McMurray has saved her from the
+lamentable errors of taste shown by the female mountebank of
+sixteenth century France.  My excellent friend safely delivered
+up an exhausted and bewildered charge at half-past seven last
+evening, assuring me that her task had been easy, and that her
+anticipations of it being the day of her life had been fulfilled.
+It had been like dressing a doll, she explained, beaming.
+
+An edifying pastime for an adult woman!  I did not utter this
+sentiment, for she would rightly have styled me the most
+ungrateful of unhung wretches.
+
+Carlotta, then, had followed her about like a perambulatory doll,
+upon which she had fitted all the finery she could lay her hands
+on.  Apparently the atmosphere of the great shops had acted on
+Carlotta like an anaesthetic.  She had moved in a sensuous dream
+of drapery, wherein the choice-impulse was paralysed.  The only
+articles upon which, in an unclouded moment, she had set her
+heart--and that with a sudden passion of covetousness--were a
+pair of red, high-heeled shoes  and a cheap red parasol.
+
+"You have no idea what it means," said Mrs. McMurray, "to buy
+_everything_ that a woman needs."
+
+I replied that I had a respectful distaste for transcendental
+philosophy.
+
+"From a paper of pins to an opera-cloak," she continued.
+
+"I'm afraid, dear Mrs. McMurray, an opera-cloak is not the
+superior limit of a woman's needs," said I.  "I wish it were."
+
+She called me a cynic and went.
+
+This morning Carlotta interrupted me in my work.
+
+"Will Seer Marcous come to my room and see my pretty things?"
+
+In summer blouse and plain skirt she looked as demure as any
+damsel in St. John's Wood.  She hung her head a little to one
+side.  For the moment I felt paternal, and indulgently consented.
+Words of man cannot describe the mass of millinery and chiffonery
+in that chamber.  The spaces that were not piled high with
+vesture gave resting spots for cardboard boxes and packing-paper.
+Antoinette stood in a corner gazing at the spoil with a smile of
+beatific idiocy.  I strode through the cardboard boxes which
+crackled like bracken, and remained dumb as a fish before these
+mysteries.  Carlotta tried on hats.  She shewed me patent leather
+shoes .  She exhibited blouses and petticoats until my eyes ached.
+She brandished something in her hand.
+
+"Tell me if I must wear it" (I believe the sophisticated call it
+"them").  "Mrs. McMurray says all ladies do.  But we never wear
+it in Alexandretta, and it hurts."
+
+She clasped herself pathetically and turned her great imploring
+eyes on me.
+
+"_Il faut souffrir pour etre belle_," I said.
+
+"But with the figure of Mademoiselle, it is stupid!" cried
+Antoinette.
+
+"It is outrageous that I should be called upon to express an
+opinion on such matters," I said, loftily.  And so it was.  My
+assertion of dignity impressed them.
+
+Then, with characteristic frankness, my young lady shakes out
+before me things all frills, embroidery, ribbons, diaphaneity,
+which the ordinary man only examines through shop-front windows
+when a philosophic mood induces him to speculate on the
+unfathomable vanity of woman.
+
+"_Les beaux dessous!_" breathed Antoinette.
+
+"The same ejaculation," I murmured, "was doubtless uttered by an
+enraptured waiting-maid, when she beheld the stout linen smocks
+of the ladies of the Heptameron."
+
+I reflected on the relativity of things mundane.  The waiting-
+maid no doubt wore some horror made of hemp against her skin.  If
+Carlotta's gossamer follies had been thrown into the vagabond
+court of the Queen of Navarre, I wonder whether those delectable
+stories would have been written?
+
+As Antoinette does not understand literary English, and as
+Carlotta did not know what in the world I was talking about, I
+was master of the conversational situation.  Carlotta went to the
+mantel-piece and returned with a glutinous mass of sweet stuff
+between her fingers.
+
+"Will Seer Marcous have some?  It is nougat."
+I declined.
+"Oh!" she said, tragically disappointed.  "It is good."
+
+There is something in that silly creature's eyes that I cannot
+resist.  She put the abominable morsel into my mouth--it was far
+too sticky for me to hold--and laughingly licked her own fingers.
+
+I went down to work again with an uneasy feeling of imperilled
+dignity.
+
+
+May 29th.
+
+I sent her word that I would take her for a drive this afternoon.
+She was to be ready at three o'clock.  It will be wholesome for
+her to regard her outings with me as rare occurrences to be
+highly valued.  Ordinarily she will go out with Antoinette--for
+the present at least--as she did yesterday.
+
+At three o'clock Stenson informed me that the cab was at the
+door.
+
+"Go up and call Mademoiselle," said I.
+
+In two or three minutes she came down.  I have not had such a
+shock in my life.  I uttered exclamations of amazement in several
+languages.  I have never seen on the stage or off such a figure
+as she presented.  Her cheeks were white with powder, her lips
+dyed a pomegranate scarlet, her eyebrows and lashes blackened.
+In her ears she wore large silver-gilt earrings.  She entered the
+room with an air of triumph, as who should say: "See how
+captivatingly beautiful I am!"
+
+At my stare of horror her face fell.  At my command to go
+upstairs and wash herself clean, she wept.
+
+"For heaven's sake, don't cry," I exclaimed, "or you will look
+like a rainbow."
+
+"I did it to please you," she sobbed.
+
+"It is only the lowest class of dancing-women who paint their
+faces in England," said I, _splendide mendax._  "And you know
+what they are in Alexandretta."
+
+"They came to Aziza-Zaza's wedding," said Carlotta, behind her
+handkerchief.  "But all our ladies do this when they want to make
+themselves look nice.  And I have put on this nasty thing that
+hurts me, just to please Seer Marcous."
+
+I felt I had been brutal.  She must have spent hours over her
+adornment.  Yet I could not have taken her out into the street.
+She looked like Jezebel, who without her paint must have been,
+like Carlotta, a remarkably handsome person.
+
+"It strikes me, Carlotta," said I, "that you will find England is
+Alexandretta upside down.  What is wrong there is right here, and
+vice versa.  Now if you want to please me run away and clean
+yourself and take off those barbaric and Brummagem earrings."
+
+She went and was absent a short while.  She returned in dismay.
+Water would not get it off.  I rang for Antoinette, but
+Antoinette had gone out.  It being too delicate a matter for
+Stenson, I fetched a pot of vaseline from my own room, and as
+Carlotta did not know what to make of it, I with my own hands
+cleansed Carlotta.  She screamed with delight, thinking it vastly
+amusing.  Her emotions are facile.  I cannot deny that it amused
+me too.  But I am in a responsible position, and I am wondering
+what the deuce I shall be doing next.
+
+I enjoyed the drive to Richmond, where I gave her tea at the Star
+and Garter and was relieved to see her drink normally from the
+cup, instead of lapping from the saucer like a kitten.  She was
+much more intelligent than during our first drive on Tuesday.
+The streets have grown more familiar, and the traffic does not
+make her head ache.  She asks me the ingenuous questions of a
+child of ten.  The tall guardsmen we passed particularly aroused
+her enthusiasm.  She had never seen anything so beautiful.  I
+asked her if she would like me to buy one and give it her to play
+with.
+
+"Oh, would you, Seer Marcous?" she exclaimed, seizing my hand
+rapturously.  I verily believe she thought I was in earnest, for
+when I turned aside my jest, she pouted in disappointment and
+declared that it was wrong to tell lies.
+
+"I am glad you have some elementary notions of ethics," said I.
+It was during our drive that it occurred to me to ask her where
+she had procured the paint and earrings.  She explained,
+cheerfully, that Antoinette had supplied the funds.  I must talk
+seriously to Antoinette.  Her attitude towards Carlotta savours
+too much of idolatry.  Demoralisation will soon set in, and the
+utter ruin of Carlotta and my digestion will be the result.  I
+must also make Carlotta a small allowance.
+
+During tea she said to me, suddenly:
+
+"Seer Marcous is not married?"
+
+I said, no.  She asked, why not?  The devil seems to be driving
+all womankind to ask me that question.
+
+"Because wives are an unmitigated nuisance," said I.
+
+A curious smile came over Carlotta's face.  It was as knowing as
+Dame Quickly's.
+
+"Then-"
+
+"Have one of these cakes," said I, hurriedly.  "There is
+chocolate outside and the inside is chock-full of custard."
+
+She bit, smiled in a different and beatific way, and forgot my
+matrimonial affairs.  I was relieved.  With her oriental training
+there is no telling what Carlotta might have said.
+
+
+May 31st.
+
+To-day I have had a curious interview.  Who should call on me but
+the father of the hapless Harry Robinson.  My first question was
+a natural one.  How on earth did he connect me with the death of
+his son?  How did he contrive to identify me as the befriender of
+the young Turkish girl whose interests, he declared, were the
+object of his visit?  It appeared that the police had given him
+the necessary information, my adventures at Waterloo having
+rendered their tracing of Carlotta an easy matter.  I had been
+wondering somewhat at the meagre newspaper reports of the
+inquest.  No mention was made, as I had nervously anticipated, of
+the mysterious lady for whom the deceased had bought a ticket at
+Alexandretta, and with whom he had come ashore.  Very little
+evidence appeared to have been taken, and the jury contented
+themselves with giving the usual verdict of temporary insanity.
+I touched on this as delicately as I could.
+"We succeeded in hushing things up," said my visitor, an old man
+with iron-grey whiskers and a careworn sensitive face.  "I have
+some influence myself, and his wife's relations--"
+
+"His wife!" I ejaculated.  The ways of men are further than ever
+from interpretation.  The fellow was actually married!
+
+"Yes," he sighed.  "That is what would have made such a terrible
+scandal.  Her relatives are powerful people.  We averted it,
+thank Heaven, and his poor wife will never know.  My boy is dead.
+No public investigation into motives would bring him back to life
+again."
+
+I murmured words of condolence.
+
+"He must have been out of his mind, poor lad, when he induced the
+girl to run away with him.  But, as my son has ruined her," he
+set his teeth as if the boy's sin stabbed him, "I must look after
+her welfare."
+
+"You may set your mind at rest on that point," said I.  "He
+smuggled her at once aboard the ship, and seems scarcely to have
+said how d'ye do to her afterwards.  That is the mad part of it."
+
+" Can I be sure?"
+
+" I would stake my life on it," said I.
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+" Frankness--I may say embarrassing frankness is one of the young
+lady's drawbacks."
+
+He looked greatly relieved.  I acquainted him with Carlotta's
+antecedents, and outlined the part I had played in the story.
+
+"Then," said he, "I will see the child back to her home.  I will
+take her there myself.  I cannot allow you any longer to have the
+burden of befriending her, when it is my duty to repair my boy's
+wrongdoing."
+
+I explained to him the terror of Hamdi Effendi's clutches, and
+told him of my promise.
+
+"Then what is to be done?" he asked.
+
+"If any kind people could be found to receive her into their
+family, and bring her up like a Christian, I should hand her over
+with the greatest of pleasure.  If there is one thing I do not
+require in this house, it is an idle and irresponsible female.
+But philanthropists are rare.  Who will take her?"
+
+"I'm afraid I'm not prepared to do that."
+
+"I never dreamed of having the bad taste to propose it," said I.
+"I merely stated the only alternative to my guardianship."
+
+"I should be willing--only too willing--to contribute towards her
+support," said Mr. Robinson.
+
+I thanked him.  But of course this was impossible.  I might as
+well have allowed the good man to pay my gas bill.
+
+"I know of a nice convent home kept by the Little Sisters of St.
+Bridget," said he, tentatively.
+
+"If it were St. Bridget herself," said I, "I would agree with
+pleasure.  She is a saint for whom I have a great fascination.
+She could work miracles.  When an Irish chieftain made her a
+facetious grant of as much land as she could cover with her
+mantle, she bade four of her nuns each take a corner and run
+north, west, south and east, until her cloak covered several
+roods.  She could have done the same with the soul of Carlotta.
+But the age of miracles is past, and I fear the Little Sisters
+would only break their gentle hearts over her.  She is an
+extraordinary creature."
+
+I know I ought to have given some consideration to the proposal;
+but I think I must suffer from chronic inflammation of the
+logical faculty.  It revolted against the suggested congruity of
+Carlotta and the Little Sisters of St. Bridget.
+
+"What can she be like?" asked the old man, wonderingly.
+
+"Would it pain you to see her?" I asked.
+
+"Yes," he said, in a low voice.  "It would.  But perhaps it would
+bring me nearer to my unhappy boy.  He seems so far away."
+
+I rang the bell and summoned Carlotta.
+
+"Perhaps you had better not say who you are," I suggested.
+
+When Carlotta entered, he rose and looked at her---oh, so
+wistfully.
+
+"This, Carlotta," said I, "is a friend of mine, who would like to
+make your acquaintance."
+
+She advanced shyly and held out a timid hand.  Obviously she was
+on her best behaviour.  I thanked heaven she had tried her
+unsuccessful experiment of powder and paint on my vile body and
+not on that of a stranger.
+
+"Do you--do you like England?" asked the old man.
+
+"Oh, very--very much.  Every one is so kind to me.  It is a nice
+place."
+
+"It is the best place in the world to be young in," said he.
+
+"Is it?" said Carlotta, with the simplicity of a baby.
+
+"The very best."
+
+"But is it not good to be old in?"
+
+"No country is good for that."
+
+The old man sighed and took his leave.  I accompanied him to the
+front door.
+
+"I don't know what to say, Sir Marcus.  She moves me strangely.
+I never expected such sweet innocence.  For my boy's sake, I
+would take her in--but his mother knows nothing about it--save
+that the boy is dead.  It would kill her."
+
+The tears rolled down the old man's cheeks.  I grasped him by the
+hand.
+
+"She shall come to no manner of harm beneath my roof," said I.
+
+Carlotta was waiting for me in the drawing-room.  She looked at
+me in a perplexed, pitiful way.
+
+"Seer Marcous?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Am I to marry him?"
+
+"Marry whom?"
+
+"That old gentleman.  I must, if you tell me.  But I do not want
+to marry him."
+
+It took me a minute or two to arrive at her oriental point of
+view.  No woman could be shown off to a man except in the light
+of a possible bride.  I think it sometimes good to administer a
+shock to Carlotta, by way of treatment.
+
+"Do you know who that old gentleman was?" said I.
+
+"No."
+
+"It was Harry's father."
+
+"Oh!" she said, with a grimace.  "I am sorry I was so nice to
+him."
+
+What the deuce am I to do with her?
+
+I lectured her for a quarter of an hour on the ethics of the
+situation.  I think I only succeeded in giving her the impression
+that I was in a bad temper.  So much did I sympathise with Harry
+that I forbore to acquaint her with the fact that he was a
+married man when he enticed her away from Alexandretta.
+
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER VI
+
+
+June 1st
+
+Sebastian Pasquale dined with me this evening.  Antoinette,
+forgetful of idolatrous practices, devoted the concentration of
+her being to the mysteries of her true religion.  The excellence
+of the result affected Pasquale so strongly that with his
+customary disregard of convention he insisted on Antoinette being
+summoned to receive his congratulations.  He rose, made her a bow
+as if she were a Marquise of pre-revolutionary days.
+
+"It is a meal," said he, bunching up his fingers to his mouth and
+kissing them open, "that one should have taken not sitting, but
+kneeling."
+
+"You stole that from Heine," said I, when the enraptured creature
+had gone, "and you gave it out to Antoinette as if it were your
+own."
+
+"My good Ordeyne," said he, "did you ever hear of a man giving
+anything authentic to a woman?"
+
+"You know much more about the matter than I do," I replied, and
+Pasquale laughed.
+
+It has been a pleasure to see him again--a creature of abounding
+vitality whom time cannot alter.  He is as lithe-limbed as when
+he was a boy, and as lithe-witted.  I don't know how his
+consciousness could have arrived at appreciation of Antoinette's
+cooking, for he talked all through dinner, giving me an account
+of his mirific adventures in foreign cities.  Among other things,
+he had been playing juvenile lead, it appears, in the comic opera
+of Bulgarian politics.  I also heard of the Viennese dancer.  My
+own little chronicle, which he insisted on my unfolding, compared
+with his was that of a caged canary compared with a
+sparrowhawk's.  Besides, I am not so expansive as Pasquale, and
+on certain matters I am silent.  He also gesticulates freely, a
+thing which is totally foreign to my nature.  As Judith would
+say, he has a temperament.  His moustaches curl fiercely upward
+until the points are nearly on a level with his flashing dark
+eyes.  Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems
+to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as
+from pegs clumsily arranged about my person.  By no conceivable
+freak of outer circumstance could I have the adventures of
+Pasquale.
+
+And yet he thinks them tame!  Lord!  If I found myself hatching
+conspiracies in Sofia on a nest made of loaded revolvers, I
+should feel that the wild whirl of Bedlam had broken loose around
+me.
+
+"But man alive!" I cried.  "What in the name of tornadoes do you
+want?"
+
+"I want to fight," said he.  "The earth has grown too grey and
+peaceful.  Life is anaemic.  We need colour--good red splashes of
+it--good wholesome bloodshed."
+
+Said I, "All you have to do is to go into a Berlin cafe and pull
+the noses of all the lieutenants you see there.  In that way
+you'll get as much gore as your heart could desire."
+
+"By Jove!" said he, springing to his feet.  "What a cause for a
+man to devote his life to--the extermination of Prussian
+lieutenants!"
+
+I leaned back in my arm-chair--it was after dinner--and smiled at
+his vehemence.  The ordinary man does not leap about like that
+during digestion.
+
+"You would have been happy as an Uscoque," said I.  (I have just
+finished the prim narrative.)
+
+"What's that?" he asked.  I told him.
+
+"The interesting thing about the Uscoques," I added, "is that
+they were a Co-operative Pirate Society of the sixteenth century,
+in which priests and monks and greengrocers and women and
+children--the general public, in fact, of Senga--took shares and
+were paid dividends.  They were also a religious people, and the
+setting out of the pirate fleet at the festivals of Easter and
+Christmas was attended by ecclesiastical ceremony.  Then they
+scoured the high seas, captured argosies, murdered the crews
+--their only weapons were hatchets and daggers and arquebuses
+--landed on undefended shores, ravaged villages and carried off
+comely maidens to replenish their stock of womenkind at home.
+They must have been a live lot of people."
+
+"What a second-hand old brigand you are," cried Pasquale, who
+during my speech had been examining the carpet by the side of his
+chair.
+
+I laughed.  "Hasn't a phase of the duality of our nature ever
+struck you?  We have a primary or everyday nature--a thing of
+habit, tradition, circumstance; and we also have a secondary
+nature which clamours for various sensations and is quite
+contented with vicarious gratification.  There are delicately
+fibred novelists who satisfy a sort of secondary Berserkism by
+writing books whose pages reek with bloodshed.  The most placid,
+benevolent, gold-spectacled paterfamilias I know, a man who
+thinks it cruel to eat live oysters, has a curious passion for
+crime and gratifies it by turning his study into a _musee
+maccabre_ of murderers' relics.  From the thumb-joint of a
+notorious criminal he can savour exquisitely morbid emotions,
+while the blood-stains on an assassin's knife fill him with the
+delicious lust of slaughter.  In the same way predestined
+spinsters obtain vicarious enjoyment of the tender passion by
+reading highly coloured love-stories."
+
+"Just as that philosophical old stick, Sir Marcus Ordeyne, dus
+from this sort of thing," said Pasquale.
+
+And he fished from the side of his chair, and held up by the tip
+of a monstrous heel, the most audacious, high-instepped, red
+satin slipper I ever saw.
+
+I eyed the thing with profound disgust.  I would have given a
+hundred pounds for it to have vanished.  In its red satin essence
+it was reprehensible, and in its feminine assertion it was
+compromising.  How did it come there?  I conjectured that
+Carlotta must have been trespassing in the drawing-room and
+dropped it, Cinderella-like, in her flight, when she heard me
+enter the house before dinner.
+
+Pasquale held it up and regarded me quizzically.  I pretend to no
+austerity of morals; but a burglar unjustly accused of theft
+suffers acuter qualms of indignation than if he were a virtuous
+person.  I regretted not having asked Pasquale to dinner at the
+club.  I particularly did not intend to explain Carlotta to
+Pasquale.  In fact, I see no reason at all for me to proclaim her
+to my acquaintance.  She is merely an accident of my
+establishment.
+
+I rose and rang the bell.
+
+"That slipper," said I, "does not belong to me, and it certainly
+ought not to be here."
+
+Pasquale surrendered it to my outstretched hand.
+
+"It must fit a remarkably pretty foot," said he.
+
+"I assure you, my dear Pasquale," I replied dryly, "I have never
+looked at the foot that it may fit."  Nor had I.  A row of pink
+toes is not a foot.
+
+"Stenson," said I, when my man appeared, "take this to Miss
+Carlotta and say with my compliments she should not have left it
+in the drawing-room."
+
+Stenson, thinking I had rung for whisky, had brought up decanter
+and glasses.  As he set the tray upon the small table, I noticed
+Pasquale look with some curiosity at my man's impassive face.
+But he said nothing more about the slipper.  I poured out his
+whisky and soda.  He drank a deep draught, curled up his
+swaggering moustache and suddenly broke into one of his
+disconcerting peals of laughter.
+
+"I haven't told you of the Gr„fin von Wentzel; I don't know what
+put her into my head.  There has been nothing like it since the
+world began.  Mind you--a real live aristocratic Gr„fin with a
+hundred quarterings!"
+
+He proceeded to relate a most scandalous, but highly amusing
+story.  An amazing, incredible tale; but it seemed familiar.
+
+"That," said I, at last, "is incident for incident a scene out of
+_L'Histoire Comique de Francion._"
+
+"Never heard of it," said Pasquale, flashing.
+
+"It was the first French novel of manners published about 1620
+and written by a man called Sorel.  I don't dream of accusing you
+of plagiarism, my dear fellow--that's absurd.  But the ridiculous
+coincidence struck me.  You and the Gr„fin and the rest of you
+were merely reenacting a three hundred year old farce."
+
+"Rubbish!" said Pasquale.
+
+"I'll show you," said I.
+
+After wandering for a moment or two round my shelves, I
+remembered that the book was in the dining-room.  I left Pasquale
+and went downstairs.  I knew it was on one of the top shelves
+near the ceiling.  Now, my dining-room is lit by one shaded
+electrolier over the table, so that the walls of the room are in
+deep shadow.  This has annoyed me many times when I have been
+book-hunting.  I really must have some top lights put in.  To
+stand on a chair and burn wax matches in order to find a
+particular book is ignominious and uncomfortable.  The successive
+illumination of four wax matches did not shed itself upon
+_L'Histoire Comique de Francion_.
+
+If there is one thing that frets me more than another, it is not
+to be able to lay my hand upon a book.  I knew Francion was there
+on the top shelves, and rather than leave it undiscovered, I
+would have spent the whole night in search.  I suppose every one
+has a harmless lunacy.  This is mine.  I must have hunted for
+that book for twenty minutes, pulling out whole blocks of volumes
+and peering with lighted matches behind, until my hands were
+covered with dust.  At last I found it had fallen to the rear of
+a ragged regiment of French novels, and in triumph I took it to
+the area of light on the table and turned up the scene in
+question.  Keeping my thumb in the place I returned to the
+drawing-room.
+
+"I'm sorry to have--" I began.  I stopped short.  I could
+scarcely believe my eyes.  There, conversing with Pasquale and
+lolling on the sofa, as if she had known him for years, was
+Carlotta.
+
+She must have seen righteous disapprobation on my face, for she
+came running up to me.
+
+"You see, I've made Miss Carlotta's acquaintance," said Pasquale.
+
+"So I perceive," said I.
+
+"Stenson told me you wanted me to come to the drawing-room in my
+red slippers," said Carlotta.
+
+"I am afraid Stenson must have misdelivered my message," said I.
+
+"Then you do not want me at all, and I must go away?"
+
+Oh, those eyes!  I am growing so tired of them.  I hesitated, and
+was lost.
+
+"Please let me stay and talk to Pasquale."
+
+"Mr. Pasquale," I corrected.
+
+She echoed my words with a cooing laugh, and taking my consent for
+granted, curled herself up in a corner of the sofa.  I resumed my
+seat with a sigh.  It would have been boorish to turn her out.
+
+"This is much nicer than Alexandretta, isn't it?" said Pasquale
+familiarly.  "And Sir Marcus is an improvement on Hamdi Effendi."
+
+"Oh, yes.  Seer Marcous lets me do whatever I like," said
+Carlotta.
+
+"I'm shot if I do," I exclaimed.  "The confinement of your
+existence in the East makes you exaggerate the comparative
+immunity from restriction which you enjoy in England."
+
+I notice that Carlotta is always impressed when I use high
+sounding words.
+
+"Still, if you could make love over garden walls, you must have
+had a pretty slack time, even in Alexandretta," said Pasquale.
+
+Obviously Carlotta had saved me the trouble of explaining her.
+
+"I once met our friend Hamdi," Pasquale continued.  "He was the
+politest old ruffian that ever had a long nose and was pitted
+with smallpox."
+
+"Yes, yes!" cried Carlotta, delighted.  "That is Hamdi."
+
+"Is there any disreputable foreigner that you are not familiar
+with?" I asked, somewhat sarcastically.
+
+"I hope not," he laughed.  "You must know I had got into a deuce
+of a row at Aleppo, about eighteen months ago, and had to take to
+my heels.  Alexandretta is the port of Aleppo and Hamdi is a sort
+of boss policeman there."
+
+"He is very rich."
+
+"He ought to be.  My interview with him cost me a thousand
+pounds--the bald-headed scoundrel!"
+
+"He is a shocking bad man," said Carlotta, gravely.
+
+"I'm afraid it is Mr. Pasquale who is the shocking bad man," I
+said, amused.  "What had you been doing in Aleppo?"
+
+"_Maxime debetur_," said he.
+
+"English are very wicked when they go to Syria," she remarked.
+
+"How can you possibly know?" I said.
+
+"Oh, I know," replied Carlotta, with a toss of her chin.
+
+"My friend," said Pasquale, lighting a cigarette, "I have
+travelled much in the East, and have had considerable adventures
+by the way; and I can assure you that what the oriental lady
+doesn't know about essential things is not worth knowing.  Their
+life from the cradle to the grave is a concentration of all their
+faculties, mortal and immortal, upon the two vital questions,
+digestion and sex."
+
+"What is sex?" asked Carlotta.
+
+"It is the Fundamental Blunder of Creation," said I.
+
+"I do not understand," said Carlotta.
+
+"Nobody tries to understand Sir Marcus," said Pasquale,
+cheerfully.  "We just let him drivel on until he is aware no one
+is listening."
+
+"Seer Marcous is very wise," said Carlotta, in serious defence of
+her lord and master.  "All day he reads in big books and writes
+on paper."
+
+I have been wondering since whether that is not as ironical a
+judgment as ever was passed.  Am I wise?  Is wisdom attained by
+reading in big books and writing on paper?  Solomon remarks that
+wisdom dwells with prudence and finds out knowledge of witty
+inventions; that the wisdom of the prudent is to understand his
+way; that wisdom and understanding keep one from the strange
+woman and the stranger which flattereth with her words.  Now, I
+have not been saved from the strange young woman who has begun to
+flatter with her words; I don't in the least understand my way,
+since I have no notion what I shall do with her; and in taking
+her in and letting her loll upon my sofa of evenings, so as to
+show off her red slippers to my guests, I have thrown prudence to
+the winds; and my only witty invention was the idea of teaching
+her typewriting, which is futile.  If the philosophy of the
+excellent aphorist is sound, I certainly have not much wisdom to
+boast of; and none of the big books will tell me what a wise man
+would have done had he met Carlotta in the Embankment Gardens.
+
+I did not think, however, that my wisdom was a proper subject for
+discussion.  I jerked back the conversation by asking Carlotta
+why she called Hamdi Effendi a shocking bad man.  Her reply was
+startling.
+
+"My mother told me.  She used to cry all day long.  She was sorry
+she married Hamdi."
+
+"Poor thingl" said I.  "Did he ill-treat her?"
+
+"Oh, ye-es.  She had small-pox, too, and she was no longer
+pretty, so Hamdi took other wives and she did not like them.
+They were so fat and cruel.  She used to tell me I must kill
+myself before I married a Turk.  Hamdi was going to make me marry
+Mohammed Ali one--two years ago; but he died.  When I said I was
+so glad" (that seems to be her usual formula of acknowledgment of
+news relating to the disasters of her acquaintance), "Hamdi shut
+me up in a dark room.  Then he said I must marry Mustapha.  That
+is why I ran away with Harry.  See?  Oh, Hamdi is shocking bad."
+
+From this and from other side-lights Carlotta has thrown on her
+upbringing, I can realise the poor, pretty weak-willed baby of a
+thing that was her mother, taking the line of least resistance,
+the husband dead and the babe in her womb, and entering the
+shelter offered by the amorous Turk.  And I can picture her
+during the fourteen years of her imprisoned life, the
+disillusion, the heart-break, the despair.  No wonder the
+invertebrate soul could do no more for her daughter than teach
+her monosyllabic English and the rudiments of reading and
+writing.  Doubtless she babbled of western life with its freedom
+and joyousness for women; but four years have elapsed since her
+death, and her stories are only elusive memories in Carlotta's
+mind.
+
+It is strange that among the deadening influences of the harem
+she has kept the hereditary alertness of the Englishwoman.  She
+has a baby mouth, it is true; she pleads to you with the eyes of
+a dog; her pretty ways are those of a young child; but she has
+not the dull, soulless, sensual look of the pure-bred Turkish
+woman, such as I have seen in Cairo through the transparent
+veils.  In them there is no attraction save of the flesh; and
+that only for the male who, deformity aside, reckons women as
+merely so much cubical content of animated matter placed by Allah
+at his disposal for the satisfaction of his desires and the
+procreation of children.  I cannot for the life of me understand
+an Englishman falling in love with a Turkish woman.  But I can
+quite understand him falling in love with Carlotta.  The
+hereditary qualities are there, though they have been forced into
+the channel of sex, and become a sort of diabolical witchery
+whereof I am not quite sure whether she is conscious.  For all
+that, I don't think she can have a soul.  I have made up my mind
+that she hasn't, and I don't like having my convictions
+disturbed.
+
+Until I saw her perched in the corner of the sofa, with her legs
+tucked up under her, and the light playing a game of magic amid
+the reds and golds and browns of her hair, while she cheerily
+discoursed to us of Hamdi's villainy, I never noticed the dull
+decorum of this room.  I was struck with the decorative value of
+mere woman.
+
+I must break myself of the habit of wandering off on a meditative
+tangent to the circle of conversation.  I was brought back by
+hearing Pasquale say:
+
+"So you're going to marry an Englishman.  It's all fixed and
+settled, eh?"
+
+"Of course," laughed Carlotta.
+
+"Have you made up your mind what he is to be like?"
+
+I could see the unconscionable Don Juan instinctively preen
+himself peacock fashion.
+
+"I am going to marry Seer Marcous," said Carlotta, calmly.
+
+She made this announcement not as a jest, not as a wish, but as
+the commonplace statement of a fact.  There was a moment of
+stupefied silence.  Pasquale who had just struck a match to light
+a cigarette stared at me and let the flame burn his fingers.  I
+stared at Carlotta, speechless.  The colossal impudence of it!
+
+"I am sorry to contradict you," said I, at last, with some
+acidity, "but you are going to do no such thing."
+
+"I am not going to marry you?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"Oh!" said Carlotta, in a tone of disappointment.
+
+Pasquale rose, brought his heels together, put his hand on his
+heart and made her a low bow.
+
+"Will you have me instead of this stray bit of Stonehenge?"
+
+"Very well," said Carlotta.
+
+I seized Pasquale by the arm.  "For goodness sake, don't jest
+with her!  She has about as much sense of humour as a prehistoric
+cave-dweller.  She thinks you have made her a serious offer of
+marriage."
+He made her another bow.
+
+"You hear what Sir Granite says?  He forbids our union.  If I
+married you without his consent, he would flay me alive, dip me
+in boiling oil and read me aloud his History of Renaissance
+Morals.  So I'm afraid it is no good."
+
+"Then I mustn't marry him either?" asked Carlotta, looking at me.
+
+"No!" I cried, "you are not going to marry anybody.  You seem to
+have hymenomania.  People don't marry in this casual way in
+England.  They think over it for a couple of years and then they
+come together in a sober, God-fearing, respectable manner."
+
+"They marry at leisure and repent in haste," interposed Pasquale.
+
+"Precisely," said I.
+
+"What we call a marriage-bed repentance," said Pasquale.
+
+"I told you this poor child had no sense of humour," I objected.
+
+"You might as well kill yourself as marry without it."
+
+"You are not going to marry anybody, Carlotta," said I, "until
+you can see a joke."
+
+"What is a joke?" inquired Carlotta.
+
+"Mr. Pasquale asked you to marry him.  He didn't mean it.  That
+was a joke.  It was enormously funny, and you should have
+laughed."
+
+"Then I must laugh when any one asks me to marry him?"
+
+"As loud as you can," said I.
+
+"You are so strange in England," sighed Carlotta.
+
+I smiled, for I did not want to make her unhappy, and I spoke to
+her intelligibly.
+
+"Well, well, when you have quite learned all the English ways,
+I'll try and find you a nice husband.  Now you had better go to
+bed."
+
+She retired, quite consoled.  When the door closed behind her,
+Pasquale shook his head at me.
+
+"Wasted!  Criminally wasted!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"That," he answered, pointing to the door.  "That bundle of
+bewildering fascination."
+
+"That," said I, "is an horrible infliction which only my
+cultivated sense of altruism enables me to tolerate."
+
+"Her name ought to be Margarita."
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+"_Ante porcos_," said he.
+
+
+Certainly Pasquale has a pretty wit and I admire it as I admire
+most of his brilliant qualities, but I fail to see the aptness of
+this last gibe.  At the club this afternoon I picked up an
+entertaining French novel called _En felons des Perles_.  On the
+illustrated cover was a row of undraped damsels sitting in
+oyster-shells, and the text of the book went to show how it was
+the hero's ambition to make a rosary of these pearls.  Now I am a
+dull pig.  Why?  Because I do not add Carlotta to my rosary.  I
+never heard such a monstrous thing in my life.  To begin with, I
+have no rosary.
+
+I wish I had not read that French novel.  I wish I had not gone
+downstairs to hunt for its seventeenth century ancestor.  I wish
+I had given Pasquale dinner at the club.
+
+It is all the fault of Antoinette.  Why can't she cook in a
+middle-class, unedifying way?  All this comes from having in the
+house a woman whose soul is in the stew-pot.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER VII
+
+
+July 1st.
+
+She has been now over five weeks under my roof, and I have put
+off the evil day of explaining her to Judith; and Judith returns
+to-morrow.
+
+I know it is odd for a philosophic bachelor to maintain in his
+establishment a young and detached female of prepossessing
+appearance.  For the oddity I care not two pins. _Io son' io_.
+But the question that exercises me occasionally is: In what
+category are my relations with Carlotta to be classified?  I do
+not regard her as a daughter; still less as a sister: not even as
+a deceased wife's sister.  For a secretary she is too abysmally
+ignorant, too grotesquely incapable.  What she knows would be
+made to kick the beam against the erudition of a guinea-pig.  Yet
+she must be classified somehow.  I must allude to her as
+something.  At present she fills the place in the house of a
+pretty (and expensive) Persian cat; and like a cat she has made
+herself serenely at home.
+
+A governess, a fat-checked girl, who I am afraid takes too
+humorous a view of the position, comes of mornings to instruct
+Carlotta in the rudiments of education.  When engaging Miss
+Griggs, I told her she must be patient, firm and, above all,
+strong-minded.  She replied that she made a professional
+specialty of these qualities, one of her present pupils being a
+young lady of the Alhambra ballet who desires the particular
+shade of cultivation that will match a new brougham.  She teaches
+Carlotta to spell, to hold a knife and fork, and corrects such
+erroneous opinions as that the sky is an inverted bowl over a
+nice flat earth, and that the sun, moon, and stars are a sort of
+electric light installation, put into the cosmos to illuminate
+Alexandretta and the Regent's Park.  Her religious instruction I
+myself shall attend to, when she is sufficiently advanced to
+understand my teaching.  At present she is a Mohammedan, if she
+is anything, and believes firmly in Allah.  I consider that a
+working Theism is quite enough for a young woman in her position
+to go on with.  In the afternoon she walks out with Antoinette.
+Once she stole forth by herself, enjoyed herself hugely for a
+short time, got lost, and was brought back thoroughly frightened
+by a policeman.  I wonder what the policeman thought of her?  The
+rest of the day she looks at picture-books and works embroidery.
+She is making an elaborate bed-spread which will give her
+harmless occupation for a couple of years.
+
+For an hour every evening, when I am at home, she comes into the
+drawing-room and drinks coffee with me and listens to my
+improving conversation.  I take this opportunity to rebuke her
+for faults committed during the day, or to commend her for
+especial good behaviour.  I also supplement the instruction in
+things in general that is given her by the excellent Miss Griggs.
+Oddly enough I am beginning to look forward to these evening
+hours.  She is so docile, so good-humoured, so spontaneous.  If
+she has a pain in her stomach, she says so with the most engaging
+frankness.  Sometimes I think of her only, in Pasquale's words,
+as a bundle of fascination, and forget that she has no soul.
+Nearly always, however, something happens to remind me.  She
+loves me to tell her stories.  The other night I solemnly related
+the history of Cinderella.  She was enchanted.  It gave me the
+idea of setting her to read "Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare."  I
+was turning this over in my mind while she chewed the cud of her
+enjoyment, when she suddenly asked whether I would like to hear a
+Turkish story.  She knew lots of nice, funny stories.  I bade her
+proceed.  She curled herself up in her favourite attitude on the
+sofa and began.
+
+I did not allow her to finish that tale.  Had I done so, I should
+have been a monster of depravity.  Compared with it the worst of
+Scheherazade's, in Burton's translation, were milk and water for
+a nunnery.  She seemed nonplussed when I told her to stop.
+
+"Are oriental ladies in the habit of telling such stories?" I
+asked.
+
+"Why, yes," she replied with a candid air of astonishment.  "It
+is a funny story."
+
+"There is nothing funny whatever in it," said I.  "A girl like
+you oughtn't to know of the existence of such things."
+
+"Why not?" asked Carlotta.
+
+I am always being caught up by her questions.  I tried to
+explain; but it was difficult.  If I had told her that a maiden's
+mind ought to be as pure as the dewy rose she would not have
+understood me.  Probably she would have thought me a fool.  And
+indeed I am inclined to question whether it is an advantage to a
+maiden's after career to be dewy-roselike in her
+unsophistication.  In order to play tunes indifferently well on
+the piano she undergoes the weary training of many years; but she
+is called upon to display the somewhat more important
+accomplishment of bringing children into the world without an
+hour's educational preparation.  The difficulty is, where to draw
+the line between this dewy, but often disastrous, ignorance and
+Carlotta's knowledge.  I find it a most delicate and embarrassing
+problem.  In fact, the problems connected with this young woman
+seem endless.  Yet they do not disturb me as much as I had
+anticipated.  I really believe I should miss my pretty Persian
+cat.  A man must be devoid of all aesthetic sense to deny that
+she is delightful to look at.
+
+And she has a thousand innocent coquetries and cajoling ways.
+She has a manner of holding chocolate creams to her white teeth
+and talking to you at the same time which is peculiarly
+fascinating.  And she must have some sense.  To-night she asked
+me what I was writing.  I replied, "A History of the Morals of
+the Renaissance."
+"What are morals and what is the Renaissance?" asked Carlotta.
+When you come to think of it, it is a profound question, which
+philosophers and historians have wasted vain lives in trying to
+answer.  I perceive that I too must try to answer it with a
+certain amount of definition.  I have spent the evening
+remodelling my Introduction, so as to define the two terms
+axiomatically with my subsequent argument, and I find it greatly
+improved.  Now this is due to Carlotta.
+
+
+The quantity of chocolate creams the child eats cannot be good
+for her digestion.  I must see to this.
+
+
+July 2d.
+
+A telegram from Judith to say she postpones her return to Monday.
+I have been longing to see the dear woman again, and I am greatly
+disappointed.  At the same time it is a respite from an
+explanation that grows more difficult every day.  I hate myself
+for the sense of relief.
+
+This morning came an evening dress for Carlotta which has taken a
+month in the making.  This, I am given to understand, is
+delirious speed for a London dress-maker.  To celebrate the
+occasion I engaged a box at the Empire for this evening and
+invited her to dine with me.  I sent a note of invitation round
+to Mrs. McMurray.
+
+Carlotta did not come down at half-past seven.  We waited.  At
+last Mrs. McMurray went up to the room and presently returned
+shepherding a shy, blushing, awkward, piteous young person who
+had evidently been crying.  My friend signed to me to take no
+notice.  I attributed the child's lack of gaiety to the ordeal
+of sitting for the first time in her life at a civilised
+dinner-table.  She scarcely spoke and scarcely ate.  I complimented
+her on her appearance and she looked beseechingly at me, as if I
+were scolding her.  After dinner Mrs. McMurray told me the reason
+of her distress.  She had found Carlotta in tears.  Never could she
+face me in that low cut evening bodice.  It outraged her modesty.
+It could not be the practice of European women to bare themselves
+so immodestly before men.  It was only the evidence of her
+visitor's own plump neck and shoulders that convinced her, and
+she suffered herself to be led downstairs in an agony of self-
+consciousness.
+
+When we entered the box at the Empire, a troupe of female
+acrobats were doing their turn.  Carlotta uttered a gasp of
+dismay, blushed burning red, and shrank back to the door.  There
+is no pretence about Carlotta.  She was shocked to the roots of
+her being.
+
+"They are naked!" she said, quiveringly.
+
+"For heaven's sake, explain," said I to Mrs. McMurray, and I beat
+a hasty retreat to the promenade.
+
+When I returned, Carlotta had been soothed down.  She was
+watching some performing dogs with intense wonderment and
+delight.  For the rest of the evening she sat spell-bound.  The
+exiguity of costume in the ballet caused her indeed to glance in
+a frightened sort of way at Mrs. McMurray, who reassured her with
+a friendly smile, but the music and the maze of motion and the
+dazzle of colour soon held her senses captive, and when the
+curtain came down she sighed like one awaking from a dream.
+
+As we drove home, she asked me:
+
+"Is it like that all day long?  Oh, please to let me live there!"
+
+A nice English girl of eighteen would not flaunt unconcerned
+about my drawing-room in a shameless dressing-gown, and crinkle
+up her toes in front of me; still less would she tell me
+outrageous stories; but she will wear low-necked dresses and gaze
+at ladies in tights without the ghost of an immodest thought.  I
+was right when I told Carlotta England was Alexandretta upside-
+down.  What is immoral here is moral there, and vice-versa.
+There is no such thing as absolute morality.  I am very glad this
+has happened.  It shows me that Carlotta is not devoid of the
+better kind of feminine instincts.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+July 4th.
+
+Judith has come back.  I have seen her and I have explained
+Carlotta.
+
+All day long I felt like a respectable person about to be brought
+before a magistrate for being drunk and disorderly.  Now I have
+the uneasy satisfaction of having been let off with a caution.  I
+am innocent, but I mustn't do it again.
+
+As soon as I entered the room Judith embraced me, and said a
+number of foolish things.  I responded to the best of my ability.
+It is not usual for our quiet lake of affection to be visited by
+such tornadoes.
+
+"Oh, I am glad, I am glad to be back with you again.  I have
+longed for you.  I couldn't write it.  I did not know I could
+long for any one so much."
+
+"I have missed you immensely, my dear Judith," said I.
+
+She looked at me queerly for a moment; then with a radiant smile:
+
+"I love you for not going into transports like a Frenchman.  Oh,
+I am tired of Frenchmen.  You are my good English Marcus, and
+worth all masculine Paris put together."
+
+"I thank you, my dear, for the compliment," said I, "but surely
+you must exaggerate."
+
+"To me you are worth the masculine universe," said Judith, and
+she seated me by her side on the sofa, held my hands, and said
+more foolish things.
+
+When the tempest had abated, I laughed.
+
+"It is you that have acquired the art of transports in Paris,"
+said I.
+
+"Perhaps I have.  Shall I teach you?"
+
+"You will have to learn moderation, my dear Judith," I remarked.
+"You have been living too rapidly of late and are looking tired."
+
+"It is only the journey," she replied.
+
+I am sure it is the unaccustomed dissipation.  Judith is not a
+strong woman, and late hours and eternal gadding about do not
+suit her constitution.  She has lost weight and there are faint
+circles under her eyes.  There are lines, too, on her face which
+only show in hours of physical strain.  I was proceeding to
+expound this to her at some length, for I consider it well for
+women to have some one to counsel them frankly in such matters,
+when she interrupted me with a gesture of impatience.
+
+"There, there!  Tell me what you have been doing with yourself.
+Your letters gave me very little information."
+
+"I am afraid," said I, "I am a poor letter writer."
+
+"I read each ten times over," she said.
+
+I kissed her hand in acknowledgment.  Then I rose, lit a
+cigarette and walked about the room.  Judith shook out her skirts
+and settled herself comfortably among the sofa-cushions.
+
+"Well, what crimes have you been committing the past few weeks?"
+
+A wandering minstrel was harping "Love's Sweet Dream" outside the
+public-house below.  I shut the window, hastily.
+
+"Nothing so bad as that," said I.  "He ought to be hung and his
+wild harp hung behind him."
+
+"You are developing nerves," said Judith.  "Is it a guilty
+conscience?" She laughed.  "You are hiding something from me.
+I've been aware of it all the time."
+
+"Indeed?  How?"
+
+"By the sixth sense of woman!"
+
+Confound the sixth sense of woman!  I suppose it has been
+developed like a cat's whiskers to supply the deficiency of a
+natural scent.  Also, like the whiskers, it is obtrusive, and a
+matter for much irritatingly complacent pride.  Judith regarded
+me with a mock magisterial air, and I was put into the dock at
+once.
+
+"Something has happened," I said, desperately.  "A female woman
+has come and taken up her residence at 26 Lingfield Terrace.  A
+few weeks ago she ate with her fingers and believed the earth was
+flat.  I found her in the Victoria Embankment Gardens beneath the
+terrace of the National Liberal Club, and now she lives on
+chocolate creams and the 'Child's Guide to Knowledge.'  She is
+eighteen and her name is Carlotta.  There!"
+
+As my cigarette had gone out, I threw it with some peevishness
+into the grate.  Judith's expression had changed from mock to
+real gravity.  She sat bolt upright and looked at me somewhat
+stonily.
+
+"What in the world do you mean, Marcus?"
+
+"What I say.  I'm saddled with the responsibility of a child of
+nature as unsophisticated and perplexing as Voltaire's Huron.
+She's English and she came from a harem in Syria, and she is as
+beautiful as the houris she believes in and is unfortunately
+precluded from joining.  One of these days I shall be teaching
+her her catechism.  I have already washed her face.  Kindly pity
+me as the innocent victim of fantastic circumstances."
+
+"I don't see why I should pity you," said Judith.
+
+I felt I had not explained Carlotta tactfully.  If there are ten
+ways of doing a thing I have noticed that I invariably select the
+one way that is wrong.  I perceived that somehow or other the
+very contingency I had feared had come to pass.  I had prejudiced
+Judith against Carlotta.  I had aroused the Ishmaelite--her hand
+against every woman and every woman's hand against her--that
+survives in all her sex.
+
+"My dear Judith," said I, "if a wicked fairy godmother had
+decreed that a healthy rhinoceros should be my housemate you
+would have extended me your sympathy.  But because Fate has
+inflicted on me an equally embarrassing guest in the shape of a
+young woman--"
+
+"My dear Marcus," interrupted Judith, "the healthy rhinoceros
+would know twenty times as much about women as you do."  This I
+consider one of the silliest remarks Judith has ever made.  "
+Do," she continued, "tell me something coherent about this young
+person you call Carlotta."
+
+I told the story from beginning to end.
+
+"But why in the world did you keep it from me?" she asked.
+
+"I mistrusted the sixth sense of woman," said I.
+
+"The most elementary sense of woman or any one else would have
+told you that you were doing a very foolish thing."
+
+"How would you have acted?"
+
+"I should have handed her over at once to the Turkish consulate."
+
+"Not if you had seen her eyes."
+
+Judith tossed her head.  "Men are all alike," she observed.
+
+"On the contrary," said I, "that which characterises men as a sex
+is their greater variation from type than women.  It is a
+scientific fact.  You will find it stated by Darwin and more
+authoritatively still by later writers.  The highest common
+factor of a hundred women is far greater than that of a hundred
+men.  The abnormal is more frequent in the male sex.  There are
+more male monsters."
+
+"That I can quite believe," snapped Judith.
+
+"Then you agree with me that men are not all alike?"
+
+"I certainly don't.  Put any one of you before a pretty face and
+a pair of silly girl's eyes and he is a perfect idiot."
+
+"My dear Judith," said I, "I don't care a hang for a pretty face-
+-except yours."
+
+"Do you really care about mine?" she asked wistfully.
+
+"My dear," said I, dropping on one knee by the sofa, and taking
+her hand, "I've been longing for it for six weeks."  And I
+counted the weeks on her fingers.
+
+This put her in a good humour.  Now that I come to think of it,
+there is something adorably infantile in grown up women.  Shall
+man ever understand them?  I have seen babies (not many, I am
+glad to say) crow with delight at having their toes pulled, with a
+"this little pig went to market," and so forth; Judith almost
+crowed at having the weeks told off on her fingers.  Queer!
+
+An hour was taken up with the account of her doings in Paris.
+She had met all the nicest and naughtiest people.  She had been
+courted and flattered.  An artist in a slouch hat, baggy corduroy
+breeches, floppy tie and general 1830 misfit had made love to her
+on the top of the Eiffel Tower.
+
+
+"And he said," laughed Judith, "'_Partons ensemble.  Comme on dit
+en Anglais_--fly with me!'  I remarked that our state when we got
+to the Champs de Mars would be an effective disguise.  He didn't
+understand, and it was delicious!"
+
+I laughed.  "All the same," I observed, "I can't see the fun of
+making jokes which the person to whom you make them doesn't see
+the point of."
+
+"Why, that's your own peculiar form of humour," she retorted.  "I
+caught the trick from you."
+
+Perhaps she is right.  I have noticed that people are slow in
+their appreciation of my witticisms.  I must really be a very
+dull dog.  If she were not fond of me I don't see how a bright
+woman like Judith could tolerate my society for half an hour.
+
+I don't think I contribute to the world's humour; but the world's
+humour contributes much to my own entertainment, and things which
+appear amusing to me do not appeal, when I point them out, to the
+risible faculties of another.  Every individual, I suppose, like
+every civilisation, must have his own standard of humour.  If I
+were a Roman (instead of an English) Epicurean, I should have
+died with laughter at the sight of a fat Christian martyr
+scudding round the arena while chased by a hungry lion.  At
+present I should faint with horror.  Indeed, I always feel
+tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious lust, when I smile
+at the oft-repeated tale of the poor tiger in Dore's picture that
+hadn't got a Christian.  On the other hand, it tickles me
+immensely to behold a plethoric commonplace Briton roar himself
+purple with impassioned platitude at a political meeting; but I
+perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost
+seriousness.  Again, your literary journalist professes to
+wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is
+the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial.
+Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-
+coat and silk hat, when a passing member of the proletariat dug
+his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of
+the period, shouted "He's got 'em on!"  whereupon both burst into
+peals of robustious but inane laughter.  Now, if I had turned to
+them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and
+paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a
+nude court of St. James's, they would have punched my head under
+the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them.  Which
+brings me to my point of departure, my remark to Judith as to the
+futility of jesting to unpercipient ears.
+
+I did not take up her retort.
+
+"And what was the end of the romance?" I asked.
+
+"He borrowed twenty francs of me to pay for the _dejeuner_, and
+his _l'annee trente_ delicacy of soul compelled him to blot my
+existence forever from his mind."
+
+"He never repaid you?" I asked.
+
+"For a humouristic philosopher," cried Judith, "you are
+delicious!"
+
+Judith is too fond of that word "delicious."  She uses it in
+season and out of season.
+
+We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and
+we use it as if it were the poorest.  We hoard up our infinite
+wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech
+dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary.  We are the
+misers of philological history.  And when we can save our pennies
+and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we
+heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into
+his hat.
+
+I said something of the sort to Judith, after she had resumed her
+seat and I had opened the window, the minstrel having wandered to
+the next hostelry, where the process of converting "Love's Sweet
+Dream" into a nightmare was still faintly audible.  Judith looked
+at me whimsically, as I stood breathing the comparatively fresh
+air and enjoying the relative silence.
+
+"You are still the same, I am glad to see.  Conversation with the
+young savage from Syria hasn't altered you in the least."
+
+"In the first place," said I, "savages do not grow in Syria; and
+in the second, how could she have altered me?"
+
+"If the heavens were to open and the New Jerusalem to appear this
+moment before you," retorted Judith, with the relevant
+irrelevance of her sex, "you would begin an unconcerned
+disquisition on the iconography of angels."
+
+I sat on the sofa end and touched one of her little pink ears.
+She has pretty ears.  They were the first of things physical
+about her that attracted me to her years ago in the Roman
+pension--they and the mass of silken flax that is her hair, and
+her violet eyes.
+
+"Did you learn that particular way of talking in Paris?" I asked.
+
+She had the effrontery to say she was imitating me and that it
+was a very good imitation indeed.
+
+
+We talked about the book.  I touched upon the great problem that
+requires solution--the harmonising and justifying of the
+contradictory opposites in Renaissance character: Fra Lippo Lippi
+breaking his own vows and breaking a nun's for her; Perugino
+leading his money-grubbing, morose life and painting ethereal
+saints and madonnas in his _bottega_, while the Baglioni filled
+the streets outside with slaughter; Lorenzo de' Medici bleeding
+literally and figuratively his fellow-citizens, going from that
+occupation to his Platonic Academy and disputing on the
+immortality of the soul, winding up with orgies of sensual
+depravity with his boon companion Pulci, and all the time making
+himself an historic name for statecraft; Pope Sixtus IV, at the
+very heart of the Pazzi conspiracy to murder the Medici--
+
+"And Pope Nicholas V when drunk ordering a man to be executed,
+and being sorry for it when sober," said Judith.
+
+It is wonderful how Judith, with her quite unspecialised
+knowledge of history can now and then put her finger upon
+something vital.  I have been racking my brain and searching my
+library for the past two or three days for an illustration of
+just that nature.  I had not thought of it.  Here is Tomaso da
+Sarzana, a quiet, retired schoolmaster, like myself, an editor of
+classical texts, a peaceful librarian of Cosmo de' Medici, a
+scholar and a gentleman to the tips of his fingers; he is made
+Pope, a King Log to save the cardinalate from a possible King
+Stork Colonna; the Porcari conspiracy breaks out, is discovered
+and the conspirators are hunted over Italy and put to death; a
+gentleman called Anguillara is slightly inculpated; he is invited
+to Rome by Nicholas, and given a safe-conduct; when he arrives
+the Pope is drunk (at least Stefano Infessura, the contemporary
+diarist, says so); the next morning his Holiness finds to his
+surprise and annoyance that the gentleman's head has been cut off
+by his orders.  It is an amazing tale.  To realise how amazing it
+is, one must picture the fantastic possibility of it happening at
+the Vatican nowadays.  And the most astounding thing is this:
+that if all the dead and gone popes were alive, and the soul of
+the saintly Pontiff of to-day were to pass from him, the one who
+could most undetected occupy his simulacrum would be this very
+Thomas of Sarzana.
+
+"Pardon me, my dear Judith," said I.  "But this is a story lying
+somewhat up one of the back-waters of history.  Where did you
+come across it?"
+
+"I saw it the other day in a French comic paper," replied Judith.
+
+I really don't know which to admire the more: the inconsequent
+way in which the French toss about scholarship, or the marvellous
+power of assimilation possessed by Judith.
+
+Before we separated she returned to the subject of Carlotta.
+
+"Am I to see this young creature?" she asked.
+"That is just as you choose," said I.
+
+"Oh!  as far as I am concerned, my dear Marcus, I am perfectly
+indifferent," replied Judith, assuming the supercilious
+expression with which women invariably try to mask inordinate
+curiosity.
+
+"Then," said I, with a touch of malice, "there is no reason why
+you should make her acquaintance."
+
+"I should be able to see through her tricks and put you on your
+guard."
+
+"Against what?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders as if it were vain to waste breath on
+so obtuse a person.
+
+"You had better bring her round some afternoon," she said.
+
+Have I acted wisely in confessing Carlotta to Judith?  And why do
+I use the word "confess"?  Far from having committed an evil
+action, I consider I have exhibited exemplary altruism.  Did I
+want a "young savage from Syria" to come and interfere with my
+perfectly ordered life?  Judith does not realise this.  I had a
+presentiment of the prejudice she would conceive against the poor
+girl, and now it has been verified.  I wish I had held my tongue.
+As Judith, for some feminine reason known only to herself, has
+steadily declined to put her foot inside my house, she might very
+well have remained unsuspicious of Carlotta's existence.  And why
+not?  The fact of the girl being my pensioner does not in the
+least affect the personality which I bring to Judith.  The idea
+is absurd.  Why wasn't I wise before the event?  I might have
+spared myself considerable worry.
+
+
+A letter from my Aunt Jessica enclosing a card for a fancy dress
+ball at the Empress Rooms.  The preposterous lady!
+
+"Do come.  It is not right for a young man to lead the life of a
+recluse of seventy.  Here we are in the height of the London
+season, and I am sure you haven't been into ten houses, when a
+hundred of the very best are open to you--"  I loathe the term
+"best houses."  The tinsel ineptitude of them!  For entertainment
+I really would sooner attend a mothers' meeting or listen to the
+serious British Drama--Have I read so and so's novel?  Am I going
+to Mrs. Chose's dance?  Do I ride in the Park?  Do I know young
+Thingummy of the Guards, who is going to marry Lady Betty
+Something?  What do I think of the Academy?  As if one could have
+any sentiment with regard to the Academy save regret at such
+profusion of fresh paint!  "You want shaking up," continued my
+aunt.  Silly woman!  If there is a thing I should abhor it would
+be to be shaken up.  "Come and dine with us at seven-thirty _in
+costume_, and I'll promise you a delightful time.  And think how
+proud the girls would be of showing off their _beau cousin_." _Et
+patiti et patita._  I am again reminded that I owe it to my
+position, my title.  God ha' mercy on us!  To bedeck myself like
+a decayed mummer in a booth and frisk about in a pestilential
+atmosphere with a crowd of strange and uninteresting young
+females is the correct way of fulfilling the obligations that the
+sovereign laid upon the successors to the title, when he
+conferred the dignity of a baronetcy on my great-grandfather!
+Now I come to think of it the Prince Regent was that sovereign,
+and my ancestor did things for him at Brighton.  Perhaps after
+all there is a savage irony of truth in Aunt Jessica's
+suggestion!
+
+And a _beau cousin_ should I be indeed.  What does she think I
+would go as?  A mousquetaire? or a troubadour in blue satin
+trunks and cloak, white silk tights and shoes  and a Grecian
+helmet, like Mr. Snodgrass at Mrs. Leo Hunter's _fete champetre?_
+
+I wish I could fathom Aunt Jessica's reasons for her attempts at
+involving me in her social mountebankery.  If the girls get no
+better dance-partners than me, heaven help them!
+
+Only a fortnight ago I drove with them to Hurlingham.  My aunt
+and Gwendolen disappeared in an unaccountable manner with another
+man, leaving me under an umbrella tent to take charge of Dora.  I
+had an hour and a half of undiluted Dora.  The dose was too
+strong, and it made my head ache.  I think I prefer neat
+Carlotta.
+
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER IX
+
+
+July 5th
+
+I lunched at home, and read drowsily before the open window till
+four o'clock.  Then the splendour of the day invited me forth.
+Whither should I go?  I thought of Judith and Hampstead Heath; I
+also thought of Carlotta and Hyde Park.  The sound of the lions
+roaring for their afternoon tea reached me through the still air,
+and I put from me a strong temptation to wander alone and
+meditative in the Zoological Gardens close by.  I must not
+forget, I reflected, that I am responsible for Carlotta's
+education, whereas I am in no wise responsible for the animals or
+for Judith.  If Judith and I had claims one on the other, the
+entire charm of our relationship would be broken.
+
+I resolved to take Carlotta to the park, in order to improve her
+mind.  She would see how well-bred Englishwomen comport
+themselves externally.  It would be a lesson in decorum.
+
+I do not despise convention.  Indeed, I follow it up to the point
+when it puts on the airs of revealed religion.  My neighbours and
+I decide on a certain code of manners which will enable us to
+meet without mutual offence.  I agree to put my handkerchief up
+to my nose when I sneeze in his presence, and he contracts not to
+wipe muddy boots on my sofa.  I undertake not to shock his wife
+by parading my hideous immorality before her eyes, and he binds
+himself not to aggravate my celibacy by beating her or kissing
+her when I am paying a call.  I agree, by wearing an arbitrarily
+fixed costume when I dine with him, to brand myself with the
+stamp of a certain class of society, so that his guests shall
+receive me without question, and he in return gives me a
+well-ordered dinner served with the minimum amount of inconvenience
+to myself that his circumstances allow.  Many folks make what they
+are pleased to call unconventionality a mere cloak for selfish
+disregard of the feelings and tastes of others.  Bohemianism too
+often means piggish sloth or slatternly ineptitude.
+
+Convention is solely a matter of manners.  That is why I desire
+to instil some convention into what, for want of a more accurate
+term, I may allude to as Carlotta's mind.  It will save me much
+trouble in the future.
+
+I summoned Carlotta.
+
+"Carlotta," I said, "I am going to take you to Hyde Park and show
+you the English aristocracy wearing their best clothes and their
+best behaviour.  You must do the same."
+
+"My best clothes?" cried Carlotta, her face lighting up.
+
+"Your very best.  Make haste."
+
+I smiled.  She ran from the room and in an incredibly short time
+reappeared unblushingly bare-necked and bare-armed in the evening
+dress that had caused her such dismay on Saturday.
+
+I jumped to my feet.  There is no denying that she looked
+amazingly beautiful.  She looked, in fact, disconcertingly
+beautiful.  I found it hard to tell her to take the dress off
+again.
+
+"Is it wrong?" she asked Nvith a pucker of her baby lips.
+
+"Yes, indeed," said I.  "People would be shocked."
+
+"But on Saturday evening--"she began.
+
+"I know, my child," I interrupted.  "In society you are scarcely
+respectable unless you go about half naked at night; but to do so
+in the daytime would be the grossest indecency.  I'll explain
+some other time."
+
+"I shall never understand," said Carlotta.
+
+Two great tears stood, one on each eyelid, and fell
+simultaneously down her cheeks.
+
+"What on earth are you crying for?" I asked aghast.
+
+"You are not pleased with me," said Carlotta, with a choke in her
+voice.
+
+The two tears fell like rain-drops on to her bosom, and she stood
+before me a picture of exquisite woe.  Then I did a very foolish
+thing.
+
+Last week a little gold brooch in a jeweller's window caught my
+fancy.  I bought it with the idea of presenting it to Carlotta,
+when an occasion offered, as a reward for peculiar merit.  Now,
+however, to show her that I was in no way angry, I abstracted the
+bauble from the drawer of my writing-table, and put it in her
+hand.
+
+"You please me so much, Carlotta," said I, "that I have bought
+this for you."
+
+Before I had completed the sentence, and before I knew what she
+was after, her arms were round my neck and she was hugging me
+like a child.
+
+I have never experienced such an odd sensation in my life as the
+touch of Carlotta's fresh young arms upon my face and the perfume
+of spring violets that emanated from her person.  I released
+myself swiftly from her indecorous demonstration.
+
+"You mustn't do things like that," said I, severely.  "In
+England, young women are only allowed to embrace their
+grandfathers."
+Carlotta looked at me wide-eyed, with the fox-terrier knitting of
+the forehead.
+
+"But you are so good to me, Seer Marcous," she said.
+
+"I hope you'll find many people good to you, Carlotta," I
+answered.  "But if you continue that method of expressing your
+appreciation, you may possibly be misunderstood."
+
+I had recovered from the momentary shock to my senses, and I
+laughed.  She fluttered a sidelong glance at me, and a smile as
+inscrutable as the Monna Lisa's hovered over her lips.
+
+"What would they do if they did not understand?"
+
+"They would take you," I replied, fixing her sternly with my
+gaze, "they would take you for an unconscionable baggage."
+
+"_Hou!_" laughed Carlotta, suddenly.  And she ran from the room.
+
+In a moment she was back again.  She came up to me demurely and
+plucked my sleeve.
+
+"Come and show me what I must put on so as to please you."
+
+I rang the bell for Antoinette, to whom I gave the necessary
+instructions.  Her next request would be that I should act the
+part of lady's-maid.  I must maintain my dignity with Carlotta.
+
+The lovely afternoon had attracted many people to the park, and
+the lawns were thronged.  We found a couple of chairs at the edge
+of one of the cross-paths and watched the elegant assembly.
+Carlotta, vastly entertained, asked innumerable questions.  How
+could I tell whether a lady was married or unmarried?  Did they
+all wear stays?  Why did every one look so happy?  Did I think
+that old man was the young girl's husband?  What were they all
+talking about?  Wouldn't I take her for a drive in one of those
+beautiful carriages?  Why hadn't I a carriage?  Then suddenly, as
+if inspired, after a few minutes' silent reflection:
+
+"Seer Marcous, is this the marriage market?"
+
+"The what?" I gasped.
+
+"The marriage market.  I read it in a book, yesterday.  Miss
+Griggs gave it me to read aloud--Tack--Thack--"
+
+"Thackeray?"
+
+"Ye-es.  They come here to sell the young girls to men who want
+wives."  She edged away from me, with a little movement of alarm.
+"That is not why you have brought me here--to sell me?"
+
+"How much do you think you would be worth?" I asked,
+sarcastically.
+
+She opened out her hands palms upward, throwing down her parasol,
+as she did so, upon her neighbour's little Belgian griffon, who
+yelped.
+
+"Ch, lots," she said in her frank way.  "I am very beautiful."
+
+I picked up the parasol, bowed apologetically to the owner of the
+stricken animal, and addressed Carlotta.
+
+"Listen, my good child.  You are passably good-looking, but you
+are by no means very beautiful.  If I tried to sell you here, you
+might possibly fetch half a crown--"
+
+"Two shillings and sixpence?" asked the literal Carlotta.
+
+"Yes.  Just that.  But as a matter of fact, no one would buy you.
+This is not the marriage market.  There is no such thing as a
+marriage market.  English mothers and fathers do not sell their
+daughters for money.  Such a thing is monstrous and impossible."
+
+"Then it was all lies I read in the book?"
+
+"All lies," said I.
+
+I hope the genial shade of the great satirist has forgiven me.
+
+"Why do they put lies in books?"
+
+"To accentuate the Truth, so that it shall prevail," I answered.
+
+This was too hard a nut for Carlotta to crack.  She was silent
+for a moment.  She reverted, ruefully, to the intelligible.
+
+"I thought I was beautiful," she said.
+
+"Who told you so?"
+
+"Pasquale."
+
+"Pasquale has no sense," said I.  "There are men to whom all
+women who are not seventy and toothless and rheumy at the eyes
+are beautiful.  Pasquale has said the same to every woman he has
+met.  He is a Lothario and a Don Juan and a Caligula and a
+Faublas and a Casanova."
+
+"And he tells lies, too?"
+
+"Millions of them," said I.  "He contracts with their father
+Beelzebub for a hundred gross a day."
+
+"Pasquale is very pretty and he makes me laugh and I like him,"
+said Carlotta.
+
+"I am very sorry to hear it," said I.
+
+The griffon, who had been sniffing at Carlotta's skirts, suddenly
+leaped into her lap.  With a swift movement of her hand she swept
+the poor little creature, as if it had been a noxious insect,
+yards away.
+
+"Carlotta!" I cried angrily, springing to my feet.
+
+The ladies who owned the beast rushed to their whining pet and
+looked astonished daggers at Carlotta.  When they picked it up,
+it sat dangling a piteous paw.  Carlotta rose, merely scared at
+my anger.  I raised my hat.
+
+"I am more than sorry.  I can't tell you how sorry I am.  I hope
+the little dog is not hurt.  My ward, for whom I offer a thousand
+apologies, is a Mohammedan, to whom all dogs are unclean.  Please
+attribute the accident to religious instinct."
+
+The younger of the two, who had been examining the paw, looked up
+with a smile.
+
+"Your ward is forgiven.  Punch oughtn't to jump on strange
+ladies' laps, whether they are Mohammedans or not.  Oh!  he is
+more frightened than hurt.  And I," she added, with a twinkling
+eye, "am more hurt than frightened, because Sir Marcus Ordeyne
+doesn't recognise me."
+
+So Carlotta had nearly killed the dog of an unrecalled
+acquaintance.
+
+"I do indeed recognise you now," said I, mendaciously.  I seem to
+have been lying to-day through thick and thin.  "But in the
+confusion of the disaster--"
+
+"You sat next me at lunch one day last winter, at Mrs.
+Ordeyne's," interrupted the lady, "and you talked to me of
+transcendental mathematics."
+
+I remembered.  "The crime," said I, "has lain heavily on my
+conscience."
+
+"I don't believe a word of it," she laughed, dismissing me with a
+bow.  I raised my hat and joined Carlotta.
+
+It was a Miss Gascoigne, a flirtatious intimate of Aunt Jessica's
+house.  To this irresponsible young woman I had openly avowed
+that I was the guardian of a beautiful Mohammedan whose religious
+instinct compelled her to destroy little dogs.  I shall hear of
+this from my Aunt Jessica.
+
+I walked stonily away with Carlotta.
+
+"You are cross with me," she whimpered.
+
+"Yes, I am.  You might have killed the poor little beast.  It was
+very wicked and cruel of you."
+
+Carlotta burst out crying in the midst of the promenade.
+
+The tears did not romantically come into her eyes as they had
+done an hour before; but she wept copiously, after the
+unrestrained manner of children, and used her pocket-
+handkerchief.  From their seats women put up their lorgnons to
+look at her, passers-by turned round and stared.  The whole of
+the gaily dressed throng seemed to be one amused gaze.  In' a
+moment or two I became conscious that reprehensory glances were
+being directed towards myself, calling me, as plain as eyes could
+call, an ill-conditioned brute, for making the poor young
+creature, who was at my mercy, thus break down in public.  It was
+a charming situation for an even-tempered philosopher.  We walked
+stolidly on, I glaring in front of me and Carlotta weeping.  The
+malice of things arranged that ne.  neighbouring chair should be
+vacant, and that the path should be unusually crowded.  I had the
+satisfaction of hearing a young fellow say to a girl:
+
+"He?  That's Ordeyne--came into the baroaetcy--mad as a dingo
+dog."
+
+I was giving myself a fine advertisement.
+
+"For heaven's sake stop crying," I said.  Then a memory of
+far-off childhood flashed its inspiration upon me.  "If you don't,"
+I added, grimly, "I'll take you out and give you to a policeman."
+
+The effect was magical.  She turned on me a scared look, gasped,
+pulled down her veil, which she had raised so as to dab her eyes
+with her pocket-handkerchief, and incontinently checked the
+fountain of her tears.
+
+"A policeman?"
+
+"Yes," said I, "a great, big, ugly blue policeman, who shuts up
+people who misbehave themselves in prison, and takes off their
+clothes, and shaves their heads, and feeds them on bread and
+water."
+
+"I won't cry any more," she said, swallowing a sob.  "Is it also
+wicked to cry?"
+
+"Any of these ladies here would sooner be burned alive with
+dyspepsia or cut in two with tight-lacing," I replied severely.
+"Let us sit down."
+
+We stepped over the low iron rail, and passing through the first
+two rows of people, found seats behind where the crowd was
+thinner.
+
+"Is Seer Marcous still angry with me?" asked Carlotta, and the
+simple plaintiveness of her voice would have melted the bust of
+Nero.  I lectured her on cruelty to animals.  That one had duties
+of kindness towards the lower creation appealed to her as a
+totally new idea.  Supposing the dog had broken all its legs and
+ribs, would she not have been sorry?  She answered frankly in the
+negative.  It was a nasty little dog.  If she had hurt it badly,
+so much the better.  What did it matter if a dog was hurt?  She
+was sorry now she had hurled it into space, because it belonged
+to my friends, and that had made me cross with her.
+
+Of course I was shocked at the thoughtless cruelty of the action;
+but my anger had also its roots in dismay at the public scandal
+it might have caused, and in the discovery that I was known to
+the victim's owner.  It is the sad fate of the instructors of
+youth that they must hypocritically credit themselves with only
+the sublimest of motives.  I spoke to Carlotta like the good
+father in the "Swiss Family Robinson."  I gave vent to such noble
+sentiments that in a quarter of an hour I glowed with pride in my
+borrowed plumes of virtue.  I would have taken a slug to my bosom
+and addressed a rattlesnake as Uncle Toby did the fly.  I wonder
+whether it is not through some such process as this that parsons
+manage to keep themselves good.
+
+The soothing warmth of conscious merit restored me to good
+temper; and when Carlotta slid her hand into mine and asked me if
+I had forgiven her, I magnanimously assured her that all the past
+was forgotten.
+
+"Only," said I, "you will have to get out of this habit of tears.
+A wise man called Burton says in his 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' a
+beautiful book which I'll give you to read when you are sixty,
+'As much count may be taken of a woman weeping as a goose going
+barefoot.'"
+
+"He was a nasty old man," said Carlotta.  "Women cry because they
+feel very unhappy.  Men are never unhappy, and that is the reason
+that men don't cry.  My mamma used to cry all the time at
+Alexandretta; but Hamdi!--" she broke into an adorable trill of
+a chuckle, "You would as soon see a goose going with boots and
+stockings, like the Puss in the shoes --the fairy tale--as Hamdi
+crying. _Hou_!"
+
+Half an hour later, as we were driving homewards, she broke a
+rather long silence which she had evidently been employing in
+meditation.
+
+"Seer Marcous."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+She has a child's engaging way of rubbing herself up against one
+when she wants to be particularly ingratiating.
+
+"It was so nice to dine with you on Saturday."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"Oh, ye-es.  When are you going to let me dine with you again, to
+show me you have forgiven me?"
+
+A hansom cab offers peculiar facilities for the aforesaid process
+of ingratiation.
+
+"You shall dine with me this evening," said I, and Carlotta cooed
+with pleasure.
+
+I perceive that she is gradually growing westernised.
+
+
+July 8th.
+
+In obedience to a peremptory note from Judith, I took Carlotta
+this afternoon to Tottenham Mansions.  I shook hands with my
+hostess, turned round and said
+
+"This, my dear Judith, is Carlotta."
+
+"I am very pleased to see you," said Judith.
+
+"So am I," replied Carlotta, not to be outdone in politeness.
+
+She sat bolt upright, most correctly, on the edge of a chair, and
+responded monosyllabically to Judith's questions.  Her demeanour
+could not have been more impeccable had she been trained in a
+French convent.  Just before we arrived, she had been laughing
+immoderately because I had ordered her to spit out a mass of
+horrible sweetmeat which she had found it impossible to
+masticate, and she had challenged me to extract it with my
+fingers.  But now, compared with her, Saint Nitouche was a
+Maenad.  I was entertained by Judith's fruitless efforts to get
+behind this wall of reserve.  Carlotta said," Oh, ye-es" or
+"No-o" to everything.  It was not a momentous conversation.  As
+it was Carlotta in whom Judith was particularly interested, I
+effaced myself.  At last, after a lull in the spasmodic talk,
+Carlotta said, very politely:
+
+"Mrs. Mainwaring has a beautiful house."
+
+"It's only a tiny flat.  Would you like to look over it?" asked
+Judith, eagerly, flashing me a glance that plainly said, "Now
+that I shall have her to myself, you may trust me to get to the
+bottom of her."
+
+"I would like it very much," said Carlotta, rising.
+
+I held the door open for them to pass out, and lit a cigarette.
+When they returned ten minutes afterwards, Carlotta was smiling
+and self-possessed, evidently very well pleased with herself, but
+Judith had a red spot on each of her cheeks.
+
+The sight of her smote me with an odd new feeling of pity.  I
+cannot dismiss the vision from my mind.  All the evening I have
+seen the two women standing side by side, a piteous parable.  The
+light from the window shone full upon them, and the dark curtain
+of the door was an effective background.  The one flaunted the
+sweet insolence of youth, health, colour, beauty; of the bud just
+burst into full flower.  The other wore the stamp of care, of the
+much knowledge wherein is much sorrow, and in her eyes dwelled
+the ghosts of dead years.  She herself looked like a ghost-
+dressed in white pique, which of itself drew the colour from her
+white face and pale lips and mass of faint straw-coloured hair,
+the pallor of all which was accentuated by the red spots on her
+cheeks and her violet eyes.
+
+I saw that something had occurred to vex her.
+
+"Before we go," I said, "I should like a word with you.  Carlotta
+will not mind."
+
+We went into the dining-room.  I took her hand which was cold, in
+spite of the July warmth.
+
+"Well, my dear," said I.  "What do you think of my young savage
+from Asia Minor?"
+
+Judith laughed--I am sure not naturally.
+
+"Is that all you wanted to say to me?"
+
+She withdrew her hand, and tidied her hair in the mirror of the
+overmantel.
+
+"I think she is a most uninteresting young woman.  I am
+disappointed.  I had anticipated something original.  I had
+looked forward to some amusement.  But, really, my dear Marcus,
+she is _bete a pleurer_--weepingly stupid."
+
+"She certainly can weep," said I.
+
+"Oh, can she?" said Judith, as if the announcement threw some
+light on Carlotta's character.  "And when she cries, I suppose
+you, like a man, give in and let her have her own way?"  And
+Judith laughed again.
+
+"My dear Judith," said I; "you have no idea of the wholesome
+discipline at Lingfield Terrace."
+
+Suddenly with one of her disconcerting changes of front, she
+turned and caught me by the coat-lappels.
+
+"Marcus dear, I have been so lonely this week.  When are you
+coming to see me?"
+
+"We'll have a whole day out on Sunday," said I.
+
+
+As I walked down the stairs with Carlotta, I reflected that
+Judith had not accounted for the red spots.
+
+"I like her," said Carlotta.  "She is a nice old lady."
+
+"Old lady!  What on earth do you mean?" I was indeed startled.
+"She is a young woman."
+
+"Pouf!" cried Carlotta.  "She is forty."
+
+"She is no such thing," I cried.  "She is years younger than I."
+
+"She would not tell me."
+
+"You asked her age?"
+
+"Oh, ye-es," said Carlotta.  "I was very polite.  I first asked
+if she was married.  She said yes.  Then I asked how her husband
+was.  She said she didn't know.  That was funny.  Why does she not
+know, Seer Marcous?"
+
+"Never mind," said I, "go on telling me how polite you were."
+
+"I asked how many children she had.  She said she had none.  I
+said it was a pity.  And then I said, 'I am eighteen years old
+and I want to marry quite soon and have children.  How old are
+you?'  And she would not tell me.  I said, 'You must be the same
+age as my mamma, if she were alive.'  I said other things, about
+her husband, which I forget.  Oh, I was very polite."
+
+She smiled up at me in quest of approbation.  I checked a
+horrified rebuke when I reflected that, according to the
+etiquette of the harem, she had been "very polite."  But my poor
+Judith!  Every artless question had been a knife thrust in a
+sensitive spot.  Her husband: the handsome blackguard who had
+lured her into the divorce court, married her, and after two
+unhappy years had left her broken; children: they would have kept
+her life sweet, and did I not know how she had yearned for them?
+Her age: it is only the very happily married woman who snaps her
+fingers at the approach of forty, and even she does so with a
+disquieting sense of bravado.  And the sweet insolence of youth
+says: "I am eighteen: how old are you?"
+
+My poor Judith!  Once more, on our walk home, I discoursed to
+Carlotta on the differences between East and West.
+
+"Seer Marcous," said Carlotta this evening at dinner--I have
+decided now that she shall dine regularly with me; it is
+undoubtedly agreeable to see her pretty face on the opposite side
+of the table and listen to her irresponsible chatter: chatter
+which I keep within the bounds of decorum when Stenson is
+present, so as to save his susceptibilities, by the simple
+device, agreed upon between us (to her great delight) of
+scratching the side of my somewhat prominent nose--"  Seer
+Marcous, why does Mrs. Mainwaring keep your picture in her
+bedroom?"
+
+I am glad Stenson happened to be out of the room.  His absence
+saved the flaying of my nasal organ.  I explained that it was the
+custom in England for ladies to collect the photographs of their
+men friends, and use them misguidedly for purposes of decoration.
+
+"But this," said Carlotta, opening out her arms in an exaggerated
+way, "is such a big one."
+
+"Ah, that," I answered, "is because I am very beautiful."
+
+Carlotta shrieked with laughter.  The exquisite comicality of the
+jest occasioned bubbling comments of mirth during the rest of the
+meal, and her original indiscreet question was happily forgotten.
+
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER X
+
+
+l0th July.
+
+Judith and I have had our day in the country.  We know a wayside
+station, on a certain line of railway, about an hour and a half
+from town, where we can alight, find eggs and bacon at the
+village inn and hayricks in a solitary meadow, and where we can
+chew the cud of these delights with the cattle in well-wooded
+pastures.  Judith has a passion for eggs and bacon and hayricks.
+My own rapture in their presence is tempered by the philosophic
+calm of my disposition.She wore a cotton dress of a forget-me-not
+blue which suits her pale colouring.  She looked quite pretty.
+When I told her so she blushed like a girl.  I was glad to see
+her in gay humour again.  Of late months she has been subject to
+moodiness, emotional variability, which has somewhat ruffled the
+smooth surface of our companionship.  But to-day there has been
+no trace of "temperament."  She has shown herself the pleasant,
+witty Judith she knows I like her to be, with a touch of coquetry
+thrown in on her own account.  She even spoke amiably of
+Carlotta.  I have not had so thoroughly enjoyable a day with
+Judith for a long time.
+
+I don't think she set herself deliberately to please me.  That I
+should resent.  I know that women in order to please an
+unsuspecting male will walk weary miles by his side with blisters
+on their feet and a beatific smile on their faces.  But Judith
+has far too much commonsense.
+
+Another pleaisng feature of the day's jaunt has been the absence
+of the appeal to sentimentality which Judith of late, especially
+since her return from Paris, has been overfond of making.  This
+idle habit of mind, for such it is in reality, has been arrested
+by an intellectual interest.  One of her great friends is
+Willoughby, the economic statistician, who in his humorous
+moments, writes articles for popular magazines, illustrated by
+scale diagrams.  He will draw, for instance, a series of men
+representing the nations of the world, and varying in bulk and
+stature according to the respective populations; and over against
+these he will set a series of pigs whose sizes are proportionate
+to the amount of pork per head eaten by the different
+nationalities.  To these queer minds that live on facts (I myself
+could as easily thrive on a diet of egg-shells) this sort of
+pictorial information is peculiarly fascinating.  But Judith, who
+like most women has a freakish mental as well as physical
+digestion, delights in knowing how many hogs a cabinet minister
+will eat during, a lifetime, and how much of the earth's surface
+could be scoured by the world's yearly output of scrubbing-
+brushes.  I don't blame her for it any more than I blame her for
+a love of radishes, which make me ill; it is not as if she had no
+wholesome tastes.  On the contrary, I commend her.  Now,
+Willoughby, it seems, has found the public appetite so great for
+these thought-saving boluses of knowledge--unpleasant drugs, as
+it were, put up into gelatine capsules--that he needs assistance.
+He has asked Judith to devil for him, and I have to-day persuaded
+her to accept his offer.  It will be an excellent thing for the
+dear woman.  It will be an absorbing occupation.  It will divert
+the current of her thoughts from the sentimentality that I
+deprecate, and provided she does not serve up hard-boiled facts to
+me at dinner, she will be the pleasanter companion.
+
+The only return to it was when I kissed her at parting.
+
+"That is the first, Marcus, for twelve hours," she said; very
+sweetly, it is true--but still reproachfully.
+
+But Sacred Name of a Little Good Man! (as the depraved French
+people say), what is the use of this continuous osculation
+between rational beings of opposite sexes who set out to enjoy
+themselves?  If only St. Paul, in the famous passage when he says
+there is a time for this and a time for that, had mentioned
+kissing, he would have done a great deal of practical good.
+
+
+July 13th.
+
+To-night, for the first time since I came into the family estates
+(such as they are), I feel the paralysis of aspiration occasioned
+by poverty.  If I were very rich, I would buy the two next
+houses, pull them down and erect on the site a tower forty foot
+high.  At the very top would be one comfortable room to be
+reached by a lift, and in this room I could have my being, while
+it listed me, and be secure from all kinds of incursions and
+interruptions.  Antoinette's one-eyed cat could not scratch for
+admittance; Antoinette herself could not enter under pretext of
+domestic economics and lure me into profitless gossip; and I
+could defy Carlotta, who is growing to be as pervasive as the
+smell of pickles over Crosse & Blackwell's factory.  She comes in
+without knocking, looks at picture-books, sprawls about doing
+nothing, smokes my best cigarettes, hums tunes which she has
+picked up from barrel-organs, bends over me to see what I am
+writing, munching her eternal sweetmeats in my ear, and laughs at
+me when I tell her she has irremediably broken the thread of my
+ideas.  Of course I might be brutal and turn her out.  But
+somehow I forget to do so, until I realise--too late--the havoc
+she has made with my work.
+
+I did, however, think, when Miss Griggs mounted guard over
+Carlotta, and Antoinette and her cat were busied with luncheon
+cook-pans, that my solitude was unimperilled.  I see now there is
+nothing for it but the tower.  And I cannot build the tower; so I
+am to be henceforward at the mercy of anything feline or feminine
+that cares to swish its tail or its skirts about my drawing-room.
+
+I was arranging my notes, I had an illuminating inspiration
+concerning the life of Francois Villon and the contemporary court
+of Cosmo de' Medici; I was preparing to fix it in writing when
+the door opened and Stenson announced:
+
+"Mrs. Ordeyne and Miss Ordeyne."
+
+My Aunt Jessica and Dora came in and my inspiration went out.  It
+hasn't come back yet.
+
+My aunt's apologies and Dora's draperies filled the room.  I must
+forgive the invasion.  They knew they were disturbing my work.
+They hoped I didn't mind.
+
+"I wanted mamma to write, but she would come," said Dora, in her
+hearty voice.  I murmured polite mendacities and offered chairs.
+Dora preferred to stand and gaze about her with feminine
+curiosity.  Women always seem to sniff for Bluebeardism in a
+bachelor's apartment.
+
+"Why, what two beautiful rooms you have.  And the books!  There
+isn't an inch of wall-space!"
+
+She went on a voyage of discovery round the shelves while my aunt
+explained the object of their visit.  Somebody, I forget who, had
+lent them a yacht.  They were making up a party for a summer
+cruise in Norwegian fiords.  The Thingummies and the So and So's
+and Lord This and Miss That had promised to come, but they were
+sadly in need of a man to play host--I was to fancy three lone
+women at the mercy of the skipper.  I did, and I didn't envy the
+skipper.  What more natural, gushed my aunt, than that they
+should turn to me, the head of the house, in their difficulty?
+
+"I am afraid, my dear aunt," said I, "that my acquaintance with
+skipper-terrorising hosts is nil.  I can't suggest any one."
+
+"But who asked you to suggest any one?" she laughed.  "It is you
+yourself that we want to persuade to have pity on us."
+
+"I have--much pity," said I, "for if it's rough, you'll all be
+horribly seasick."
+
+Dora ran across the room from the book-case she was inspecting.
+
+"I would like to shake him!  He is only pretending he doesn't
+understand.  I don't know what we shall do if you won't come with
+us."
+
+"You can't refuse, Marcus.  It will be an ideal trip--and such a
+comfortable yacht--and the deep blue fiords--and we've got a
+French chef.  You will be doing us such a favour."
+
+"Come, say 'Yes,'" said Dora.
+
+I wish she were not such a bouncing Juno of a girl.  Large,
+athletic women with hearty voices are difficult for one to deal
+with.  I am a match for my aunt, whom I can obfuscate with words.
+But Dora doesn't understand my satire; she gives a great, healthy
+laugh, and says, "Oh, rot!" which scatters my intellectual
+armoury.
+
+"It is exceedingly kind of you to think of me," I said to my
+aunt, "and the proposal is tempting--the prospect is indeed
+fascinating--but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"I have so many engagements," I answered feebly.
+
+My Aunt Jessica rose, smiling indulgently upon me, as if I were a
+spoilt little boy, and took me on to the balcony, while Dora
+demurely retired to the bookshelves in the farther room.
+"Can't you manage to throw them aside?  Poor Dora will be
+inconsolable."
+
+I stared at her for a moment and then at Dora's broad back and
+sturdy hips.  Inconsolable?  I can't make out what the good lady
+is driving at.  If she were a vulgar woman trying to squeeze her
+way into society and needed the lubricant of the family
+baronetcy, I could understand her eagerness to parade me as her
+appanage.  But titles in her drawing-room are as common as
+tea-cups.  And the inconsolability of Dora
+
+"If I did come she would be bored to death," said I.
+
+"She is willing to risk it."
+
+"But why should she seek martyrdom?"
+
+"There is another reason," said my aunt, ignoring my pertinent
+question, but glancing at me reassuringly "there is another
+reason why it would be well for you to come on this cruise with
+us."  She sank her voice.  "You met Miss Gascoigne in the park
+last week--"
+
+"A very charming and kind young lady," said I.
+
+"I am afraid you have been a little indiscreet.  People have been
+talking."
+
+"Then theirs, not mine, is the indiscretion."
+
+"But, my dear Marcus, when you spring a good-looking young
+person, whom you introduce as your Mohammedan ward, upon London
+society, and she makes a scene in public--why--what else have
+people got to talk about?"
+
+"They might fall back upon the doctrine of predestination or the
+price of fish," I replied urbanely.
+
+"But I assure you, Marcus, that there is a hint of scandal
+abroad.  It is actually said that she is living here."
+
+"People will say anything, true or untrue," said I.
+
+My aunt sighfully acquiesced, and for a while we discussed the
+depravity of human nature.
+
+"I have been thinking," she said at last, "that if you brought
+your ward to see us, and she could accompany us on this cruise to
+Norway, the scandal would be scotched outright."
+
+She glanced at me very keenly, and beneath her indulgent smile I
+saw the hardness of the old campaigner.  It was a clever trap she
+had prepared for me.
+
+I took her hand and in my noblest manner, like the exiled vicomte
+in costume drama, bent over it and kissed her finger-tips.
+
+"I thank you, my dear aunt, for your generous faith in my
+integrity," I said, "and I assure you your confidence is well
+founded."
+
+A loud, gay laugh from the other room interrupted me.
+
+"Are you two rehearsing private theatricals?" cried Dora.  As I
+was attired in a remarkably old college blazer and a pair of
+yellow Moorish slippers bought a couple of years ago in Tangier,
+and as my hair was straight on end, owing to a habit of passing
+my fingers through it while I work, my attitude perhaps did not
+strike a spectator as being so noble as I had imagined.  I took
+advantage of the anti-climax, however, to bring my aunt from the
+balcony to the centre of the room, where Dora joined us.
+
+"Well, has mother prevailed?"
+
+"My dear Dora," said I, politely, "how can you imagine it could
+possibly be a question of persuasion?"
+
+"That might be taken two ways," said Dora.  "Like Palmerston's
+'Dear Sir, I'll lose no time in reading your book.'"
+Dora is a minx.
+
+"I fear," said I, "that my pedantic historical sense must venture
+to correct you.  It was Lord Beaconsfield."
+
+"Well, he got it from Palmerston," insisted Dora.
+
+"You children must not quarrel," interposed my aunt, in the fond,
+maternal tone which I find peculiarly unpleasant.  "Marcus will
+see how his engagements stand, and let us know in a day or two."
+
+"When do you propose to start?" I asked.
+
+"Quite soon.  On the 20th.
+
+"I will let you know finally in good time," said I.
+
+As I accompanied them downstairs, I heard a door at the end of
+the passage open, and turning I saw Carlotta's pretty head thrust
+past the jamb, and her eyes fixed on the visitors.  I motioned
+her back, sharply, and my aunt and Dora made an unsuspecting
+exit.  The noise of their departing chariot wheels was music to
+my ears.
+
+Carlotta came rushing out of her sitting-room followed by Miss
+Griggs, protesting.
+
+"Who those fine ladies?" she cried, with her hands on my sleeve.
+
+"Who _are_ those ladies?" I corrected.
+
+"Who _are_ those ladies?" Carlotta repeated, like a demure
+parrot.
+
+"They are friends of mine."
+
+Then came the eternal question.
+
+"Is she married, the young one?"
+
+"Miss Griggs," said I, "kindly instil into Carlotta's mind the
+fact that no young English woman ever thinks about marriage until
+she is actually engaged, and then her thoughts do not go beyond
+the wedding."
+
+"But is she?" persisted Carlotta.
+
+"I wish to heaven she was," I laughed, imprudently, "for then she
+would not come and spoil my morning's work."
+
+"Oh, she wants to marry you," said Carlotta.
+
+"Miss Griggs," said I, "Carlotta will resume her studies," and I
+went upstairs, sighing for the beautiful tower with a lift
+outside.
+
+
+July 14th.
+
+Pasquale came in about nine o'clock, and found us playing cards.
+
+He is a bird of passage with no fixed abode.  Some weeks ago he
+gave up his chambers in St. James's, and went to live with an
+actor friend, a grass-widower, who has a house in the St. John's
+Wood Road close by.  Why Pasquale, who loves the palpitating
+centres of existence, should choose to rusticate in this
+semi-arcadian district, I cannot imagine.  He says he can think
+better in St. John's Wood.
+
+Pasquale think!  As well might a salmon declare it could sing
+better in a pond!  The consequence of his propinquity, however,
+has been that he has dropped in several times lately on his way
+home, but generally at a later hour.
+
+"Oh, please don't move and spoil the picture," he cried.  "Oh,
+you idyllic pair!  And what are you playing?  Cribbage!  If I had
+been challenged to guess the game you would have selected for
+your after-dinner entertainment, I should have sworn to
+cribbage!"
+
+"An excellent game," said I.  Indeed, it is the only game that I
+remember.  I dislike cards.  They bore me to death.  So dus
+chess.  People love to call them intellectual pastimes; but,
+surely, if a man wants exercise for his intellect, there are
+enough problems in this complicated universe for him to worry his
+brains over, with more profit to himself and the world.  And as
+for the pastime--I consider that when two or more intelligent
+people sit down to play cards they are insulting one another's
+powers of conversation.  These remarks do not apply to my game
+with Carlotta, who is a child, and has to be amused.  She has
+picked up cribbage with remarkable quickness, and although this
+is only the third evening we have played, she was getting the
+better of me when Pasquale appeared.
+
+I repeated my statement.  Cribbage certainly was an excellent
+game.  Pasquale laughed.
+
+"Of course it is.  A venerable pastime.  Darby and Joan have
+played it of evenings for the last thousand years.  Please go
+on."
+
+But Carlotta threw her cards on the table and herself on the sofa
+and said she would prefer to hear Pasquale talk.
+
+"He says such funny things."
+
+Then she jumped from the sofa and handed him the box of
+chocolates that is never far from her side.  How lithe her
+movements are!
+
+"Pasquale says you were his schoolmaster, and used to beat him
+with a big stick," she remarked, turning her head toward me,
+while Pasquale helped himself to a sweet.
+
+He was clumsy in his selection, and the box slipped from
+Carlotta's hand and the contents rolled upon the floor.  They
+both went on hands and knees to pick them up, and there was much
+laughing and whispering.
+
+It is curious that I cannot recall Pasquale having alluded, in
+Carlotta's presence, to our early days.  It was on my tongue to
+ask when he committed the mendacity--for in that school not only
+did the assistant masters not have the power of the cane, but
+Pasquale, being in the sixth form at the time I joined, was
+exempt from corporal punishment--when they both rose flushed from
+their grovelling beneath the table, and some merry remark from
+Pasquale put the question out of my head.
+
+
+All this is unimportant.  The main result of Pasquale's visit
+this evening is a discovery.
+
+Now, is it, after all, a discovery, or only the non-moral
+intellect's sinister attribution of motives?
+
+"A baby in long clothes would have seen through it," said
+Pasquale.  "Lord bless you, if I were in your position I would go
+on board that yacht, I'd make violent love to every female there,
+like the gentleman in Mr. Wycherley's comedy, I'd fill a salmon
+fly-book with samples of their hair, I'd make them hate one
+another like poison, and at the end of the voyage I'd announce my
+engagement to Carlotta, and when they all came to the wedding I'd
+make the fly-book the most conspicuous of wedding presents on the
+table, from the bridegroom to the bride.  By George!  I'd cure
+them of the taste for man-hunting!"
+
+I wonder what impelled me to tell Pasquale of the proposed
+yachting cruise?  We sat smoking by the open window, long after
+Carlotta had been sent to bed, and looking at a full moon sailing
+over the tops of the trees in the park; enveloped in that
+sensuous atmosphere of a warm summer night which induces a
+languor in the body and in the will.  On such a night as this
+young Lorenzo, if he happens to have Jessica by his side, makes a
+confounded idiot of himself, to his life's undoing; and on such a
+night as this a reserved philosopher commits the folly of
+discussing his private affairs with a Sebastian Pasquale.
+
+But if he is correct in his surmise, I am much beholden to the
+relaxing influences of the night.  I have been warned of perils
+that encompass me: perils that would infest the base and
+insidiously scale the sides of the most inaccessible tower that
+man could build on the edge of the Regent's Park.  A woman with a
+Matrimonial Purpose would be quite capable of gaining access by
+balloon to my turret window.  Is it not my Aunt Jessica's design
+melodramatically to abduct me in a yacht?
+
+"Once aboard the pirate lugger, and the man is ours!" she cries.
+
+But the man is not coming aboard the pirate lugger.  He is going
+to keep as far as he possibly can from the shore.  Neither is he
+to be lured into bringing his lovely Mohammedan ward with him, as
+an evidence of good faith and unimpeachable morals.  They can
+regard her as a Mohammedan ward or a houri or a Princess of
+Babylon, just as they choose.
+
+Pasquale must be right.  A hundred remembered incidents go to
+prove it.  I recollect now that Judith has rallied me on my
+obtuseness.
+
+The sole end of all my Aunt Jessica's manoeuvring is to marry me
+to Dora, and Dora, like Barkis, is willing.  Marry Dora!  The
+thought is a febrifuge, a sudorific!  She would be thumping
+discords on my wornout strings all day long.  In a month I should
+be a writhing madman.  I would sooner, infinitely sooner, marry
+Carlotta.  Carlotta is nature; Dora isn't even art.  Why, in the
+name of men and angels, should I marry Dora?  And why (save to
+call herself Lady Ordeyne) should she want to marry me?  I have
+not trifled with her virgin affections; and that she is
+nourishing a romantic passion for me of spontaneous growth I
+decline to believe.  For aught I care she can be as inconsolable
+as Calypso.  It will do her good.  She can write a little story
+about it in _The Sirens' Magazine_.
+
+I am shocked.  For all her bouncing ways and animal health and
+incorrect information, I thought Dora was a nice-minded girl.
+
+Do nice-minded girls hunt husbands?
+
+Good heavens!  This looks like the subject of a silly-season
+correspondence in _The Daily Telegraph_.
+
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER XI
+
+
+July 19th.
+
+_Campsie, N.B._  Hither have I fled from my buccaneering
+relations.  I am seeking shelter in a manse in the midst of a
+Scotch moor, and the village, half a mile away, is itself five
+miles from a railway station.  Here I can defy Aunt Jessica.
+
+After my conversation with Pasquale, I passed a restless night.
+My slumbers were haunted by dreams of pirate yachts flying the
+jolly Roger, on which the skull and crossbones melted grotesquely
+into a wedding-ring and a true lovers' knot.  I awoke to the
+conviction that so long as the vessel remained on English waters
+I could find no security in London.  I resolved on flight.  But
+whither?
+
+Verily the high gods must hold me in peculiar favour.  The first
+letter I opened was from old Simon McQuhatty, my present host, a
+godfather of my mother, who alone of mortals befriended us in the
+dark days of long ago.  He was old and infirm, he wrote, and
+Gossip Death was waiting for him on the moor; but before he went
+to join him he would like to see Susan's boy again.  I could come
+whenever I liked.  A telegram from Euston before I started would
+be sufficient notice.  I sent Stenson out with a telegram to say
+I was starting that very day by the two o'clock train, and I
+wrote a polite letter to my Aunt Jessica informing her of my
+regret at not being able to accept her kind invitation as I was
+summoned to Scotland for an indefinite period.
+
+My old friend's ministry in the Free Kirk of Scotland is drawing
+to a close; he has lived in this manse, a stone's throw from his
+grave, for fifty years, and the approaching change of habitat
+will cost him nothing.  He will still lie at the foot of his
+beloved hills, and the purple moorland will spread around him for
+all eternity, and the smell of the gorse and heather will fill
+his nostrils as he sleeps.  He is a bit of a pagan, old
+McQuhatty, in spite of Calvin and the Shorter Catechism.  I
+should not wonder if he were the original of the story of the
+minister who prayed for the "puir Deil."  He planted a rowan tree
+by his porch when he was first inducted into the manse, and it
+has grown up with him and he loves it as if it were a human
+being.  He has had many bonny arguments with it, he says, on
+points of doctrine, and it has brought comfort to him in times of
+doubt by shivering its delicate leaves and whispering, "Dinna
+fash yoursel, McQuhatty.  The Lord God is a sensible body."  He
+declares that the words are articulate, and I suspect that in the
+depths of his heart he believes that there are tongues in trees
+and books in the running brooks, just as he is convinced that
+there is good in everything.
+
+He is a ripe and whimsical scholar, and his talk, even in infirm
+old age, is marked by a Doric virility which has rendered his
+companionship for these five days as stimulating as the moorland
+air.  How few men have this gift of discharging intellectual
+invigoration.  Indeed, I only know old McQuhatty who has it, and
+a sportive Providence has carefully excluded mankind from its
+benefits for half a century.  Stay: it once fostered a genius who
+arose in Campsie, and sent him strung with tonic to Edinburgh to
+become a poet.  But the poor lad drank whisky for two years
+without cessation, so that he died, and McQuhatty's inspiration
+was wasted.  What intellectual stimulus can he afford, for
+instance, to Sandy McGrath, an elder of the kirk whom I saw
+coming up the brae on Sunday?  An old ram stood in the path and,
+as obstinate as he, refused to budge.  And as they looked dourly
+at each other, I wondered if the ram were dressed in black
+broadcloth and McGrath in wool, whether either of their mothers
+would notice the metamorphosis.  Yet my host declares that I see
+with the eyes of a Southron; that the Scotch peasant when he is
+not drunk is intellectual, and that there is no occasion on which
+he is not ready for theological disputation.
+
+"But I dinna mind telling you," he added, "that I'd as lief talk
+with my rowan tree.  It does nae blaze into a conflagration at a
+comfortable wee bit of false doctrine."
+
+I should love to stay all the summer with my old friend, It seems
+that only from such a remote solitude can one view things mundane
+in the right perspective, and in their true proportion.  One
+would see how important or unimportant portant in the cosmos was
+the agricultural ant's dream of three millimetres and an aphis
+compared with the aspirations of the English labourer.  One would
+justly focus the South African millionaire, Sandy McGrath and the
+ram, and bring them to their real lowest common denominator.  One
+would even be able to gauge the value of a History of Renaissance
+Morals.  The benefits I should derive from a long sojourn are
+incalculable, but my new responsibilities call me back to London
+and its refracting and distorting atmosphere.  If I had dwelt
+here for fifty years I should have perceived that Carlotta was
+but a speck in the whirlwind of human dust whose ultimate destiny
+was immaterial.  As my five days' visit, however, has not
+advanced me to that pitch of wisdom, I am foolishly concerned in
+my mind as to her welfare, and anxious to dissolve the
+triumvirate, Miss Griggs, Stenson, and Antoinette, whom I have
+entrusted with the reins of government.
+
+A month ago, in similar circumstances, I should have railed at
+Fate and anathematised Carlotta from the tip of her pink toes to
+the gold and bronze glory of her hair.  But I am growing more
+kindly disposed towards Carlotta, and taking a keen interest in
+her spiritual development.
+
+An inner voice, an ironical, sardonic inner voice with which
+there is no arguing, tells me that I am a hypocrite; that an
+interest in Carlotta's spiritual development is a nice,
+comforting, high-sounding phrase which has deluded philosophic
+guardians of female youth for many generations.
+
+"What does it matter to you whether she has a soul or not," says
+the voice, "provided she can babble pleasantly at dinner and play
+cribbage with you afterwards?"
+
+Well, what on earth does it matter?
+
+
+July 21st.
+
+She was at Euston to meet me.  As soon as she saw my face at the
+carriage window she left Stenson and flew up the platform like a
+pretty tame animal, and when I alighted hung on my arms and
+frisked and gamboled around me in excess of joy.
+
+"So you are glad to have me back, Carlotta?" I asked, as we were
+driving home.
+
+She sidled up against me in her terrier fashion.
+
+"Oh, ye-es," she cooed.  "The day was night without you."
+
+"That is the oriental language of exaggeration," I said.  But all
+the same it was pleasant to hear, and the soft notes of her voice
+coiled themselves, as music sometimes dus, around my heart.
+
+"I love dear Seer Marcous," she said.
+
+I put my arm round her waist for a moment, as one would do to a
+child.
+
+"You are a good little girl, Carlotta.  That is to say," I added,
+remembering my responsibilities, "if you _have_ been good.  Have
+you?"
+
+"Oh, so good.  Antoinette has been teaching me how to cook, and I
+can make a rice pudding.  It is so nice to cook things.  I like
+the smell.  But I burned myself.  See."
+
+She pulled off her glove and showed me a red mark on her hand.  I
+kissed it to make it well, and she laughed and was very happy.
+And I, too, was happy.  Something new and fresh and bright has
+come into my life.  Stenson is an admirable servant; but his
+impassive face and correct salute which have hitherto greeted me
+at London railway termini, although suggestive of material
+comfort, cannot be said to invest my arrival with a special
+atmosphere of charm.  Carlotta's welcome has been a new
+sensation.  I look upon the house with different eyes.  It was a
+pleasure, as I dressed for dinner, to reflect that I should not
+go down to a solemn, solitary meal, but would have my beautiful
+little witch to keep me company.
+
+
+July 22d.
+
+It appears that her conduct has not been by any means
+irreproachable.  Miss Griggs reported that she took advantage of
+my absence to saturate herself with scent, one of the most
+heinous crimes in our domestic calendar. _Mulier bene olet dum
+nihil olet_ is the maxim written above this article of our code.
+Once when she disobeyed my orders and came into the drawing-room
+reeking of ylang-ylang, I sent her upstairs to change all her
+things and have a bath, and not come near me till Antoinette
+vouched for her scentlessness.  And "Ah, monsieur," I remember
+Antoinette replied, "that would be impossible, for the sweet lamb
+smells of spring flowers, _de son naturel_."  Which is true.  Her
+use of violent perfumes is thus a double offence.  "There is
+something more serious," said Miss Griggs.
+
+"I can hardly believe there can be anything more serious than
+making one's self detestable to one's fellow-creatures," said I.
+
+"Unless it is making one's self too agreeable," said Miss Griggs,
+pointedly.
+
+I asked her what she meant.
+
+"I have discovered," she replied, "that Carlotta has been
+carrying on a clandestine flirtation with the young man who calls
+for orders from the grocer's."
+
+"I am glad it wasn't the butcher's boy," I murmured.
+
+Miss Griggs giggled in a silly way, as if I were jesting.  At my
+stern request she recovered and unfolded the horrible tale.  She
+had caught Carlotta kissing her hand to him.  She had also seen
+him smuggle a three-cornered note between Carlotta's fingers, and
+Carlotta had definitely refused to surrender the billet-dour.
+
+"What is the modern course of treatment," I asked, "prescribed
+for young ladies who flirt with grocers' assistants?  In
+Renaissance times she could be whipped.  The wise Margaret of
+Navarre used to beat her daughter, Jeanne d'Albrecht, soundly for
+far less culpable lapses from duty.  Or she could be sent to a
+convent and put into a cell with rats, or she could be bidden to
+attend at a merry-making where the chief attraction was roast
+grocer's assistant.  But nowadays--what do you suggest?"
+
+The unimaginative creature could suggest nothing.  She thought
+that I would know how to deal with the offence.  Perhaps
+preventive measures would be more efficacious than punishment.
+But what do I know of the repressory methods employed in
+seminaries for young ladies?  Burton in his "Anatomy" speaks
+cheerfully of blood-letting behind the ears.  He also quotes, I
+remember, Hippocrates or somebody, who narrates that a noble
+maiden was cured of a flirtatious temperament by wearing down her
+back for three weeks a leaden plate pierced with holes.  This I
+told Miss Griggs, who spoke contemptuously of the Father of
+Medicine.
+
+"He also recommends--whether for this complaint, or for something
+similar I forget for the moment--" said I, "anointing the soles
+of the feet with the fat of a dormouse, the teeth with the ear-
+wax of a dog; and speaks highly of a ram's lungs applied hot to
+the fore part of the head.  I am sorry these admirable remedies
+are out of date.  There is a rich Rabelaisianism about them.
+Instead of the satisfying jorums of our forefathers we take
+tasteless pellets, which procure us no sensation at the time, and
+even the good old hot mustard poultice is a thing of the past."
+
+"But what about Carlotta?" inquired Miss Griggs, anxiously.
+
+That is just like a woman, to interrupt a man when he is
+beginning to talk comfortably on a subject that interests him.  I
+sighed.
+
+"Send Carlotta up to me," I said, resignedly.
+
+Another morning's work spoiled.  I turned to my writing-table.  I
+had just transcribed on my MS. the anecdote told with such glee
+by Machiavelli about Zanobi del Pino, a sort of Admiral Byng of
+the early fifteenth century, who was locked up and given nothing
+to eat but paper painted with snakes, so that he died, fasting,
+in a few days.  I had an apt epigram on the subject of
+Renaissance humour trembling on my pen-point, when Miss Griggs
+came in with her foolish gossip.  I am sure the platitude I wrote
+afterwards is not that original flash of wit.
+
+Carlotta entered and crossed the room to the side of my writing-
+chair, her great dark eyes fixed on me, and her hands dutifully
+behind her back.  She looked a Greuze picture of innocence.  I
+believed less than ever in the enormity of the offence.
+
+"Do you know what you're here for?" I asked, magisterially.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Then you _have_ been making love to the young man from the
+grocer's?"
+
+She nodded again.  I began to conceive a violent dislike to the
+grocer's young man.  It was one of the most humiliating
+sensations I have experienced.  I think I have seen the
+individual--a thick-set, red-headed, freckled nondescript.
+
+"What did you do it for?" I asked.
+
+"He wanted to make love to me," replied Carlotta.
+
+"He is a young scamp," said I.
+
+"What is a scamp?" she asked sweetly.
+
+"I am not giving you a lesson in philology," I remarked.  "Do you
+know that you have been behaving in a shocking manner?"
+
+"Now you are cross with me."
+
+"Yes," I said, "infernally angry."
+
+And I was.  I expected to see her burst into tears.  She did
+nothing of the kind; only looked at me with irritating
+demureness.  She wore a red blouse and a grey skirt, and the
+audacious high-heeled red slippers.  I began to feel the return
+of my early prejudice against her.  Nobody so alluring could
+possess a spark of virtue.
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," said I.  "I make many
+allowances for your lack of knowledge of our Western customs, but
+for a young lady to flirt with an ugly red-headed varlet of the
+lower orders is reprehensible all the world over."
+
+"He gave me dates and dried fruits with sugar all over them,"
+said Carlotta.
+
+"Stolen from his employer," I said.  "I will have that young man
+locked up in prison, and if you go on receiving his feloniously
+obtained presents they will put you in prison too, and I shall be
+delighted."
+
+Carlotta maintained her demure expression and extracted from her
+skirt pocket a very dirty piece of paper.
+
+"He writes poetry--about me," she remarked, handing me what I
+recognised as the three-cornered note.
+
+I took the thing between finger and thumb, and glanced over the
+poem.  I have read much indifferent modern verse in my time--I
+sometimes take a slush-bath after tea at the club--but I could
+not have imagined the English language capable of such emulsion.
+It was execrable.  The first couplet alone contained an idea.
+
+            "Thou art a lovely girl and so very nice
+              I dream till death upon your face."
+
+To the wretch's ear it was a rhyme!  I destroyed the noisome
+thing and cast it into the waste-paper basket.
+
+"Prison," said I, "would be a luxurious reward for him.  In a
+properly civilised country he would be bastinadoed and hanged."
+
+"Yes, he is dam bad," said Carlotta, serenely.
+
+"Good heavens!" I cried, "the ruffian has even taught you to
+swear.  If you dare to say that wicked word again, I'll punish
+you severely.  What is his horrid name?"
+
+"Pasquale," said Carlotta.
+
+"Pasquale?"
+
+"Yes, he likes to hear me say 'dam.'  Oh, the other?  Oh, no, he
+is too stupid.  He does not say anything.  His name is Timkins.  I
+only play with him.  He is so funny.  He can go and kill himself;
+I won't care."
+
+"Never mind about Timkins," said I, "I want to hear about
+Pasquale.  When did he teach you that wicked, wicked word?"
+
+I think Carlotta flushed as she regarded the point of her red
+slipper.
+
+"I went for a walk and he met me at the corner and walked here by
+my side.  Was that wicked?"
+
+"What would the excellent Hamdi Effendi have said to it?"
+
+Woman-like she evaded my question.
+
+"I hope Hamdi is dead.  Do you think so?"
+
+"I hope not.  For if you behave in this naughty manner, I shall
+have to send you back to him."
+
+She had imperceptibly moved nearer my chair until she stood quite
+close to my side, so that as I spoke the last words I looked up
+into her face.  She put her arm about my shoulders.  It is one of
+her pretty, caressing ways.
+
+"I will be good--very good," she said.
+
+"You will have to," said I, leaning back my head.
+
+She must have caught a relenting note in my voice; for what
+happened I feel even now a curious shame in noting down.  Her
+other arm flew under my chin to join its fellow, and holding me a
+prisoner in my chair, she bent down and kissed me.  She also laid
+her cheek against mine.
+
+I am still aware of the indescribable, soft, warm pressure,
+although she has gone to bed hours ago.
+
+I vow that a man must be less a man than a petrified egg to have
+repulsed her.  The touch of her lips was like the falling of dewy
+rose-petals.  Her breath was as fragrant as new-mown hay.  Her
+hair brushing my forehead had the odour of violets.
+
+
+I sent her back to Miss Griggs.  She ran out of the room laughing
+merrily.  She has received plenary absolution for her shameless
+coquetry and her profane language.  Worse than that she has
+discovered how to obtain it in future.  The witch has found her
+witchcraft, and having once triumphantly exerted her powers, will
+take the earliest opportunity of doing so again.  I am fallen,
+both in my own eyes and hers, from my high estate.  Henceforward
+she will regard me only with good-humoured tolerance; I shall be
+to her but a non-felonious Timkins.
+
+I was an idiot to have kissed her in return.
+
+
+I have not seen her since.  I lunched at the club, and paid a
+formal call on Mrs. Ralph Ordeyne and my cousin Rosalie, in their
+sunless house in Kensington.
+
+I met a singular lack of welcome.  Rosalie gave me a limper
+hand than usual, and took an early opportunity of leaving me
+tete-a-tete with her mother, who conversed frigidly about the
+warm weather.  The very tea, if possible, was colder.
+
+I met Judith by appointment in Kensington Gardens, and walked
+with her homewards.  I mentioned my chilly reception.
+
+"My dear man," she observed--I dislike this apostrophe, which
+Judith always uses by way of introduction to an unpleasant
+remark--"My dear man, I have no doubt that you have as unsavoury
+a reputation as any one in London.  You are credited with an
+establishment like Solomon's--minus the respectable counter-balance
+of the wives, and your devout relatives are very properly shocked."
+
+I said that it was monstrous.  Judith retorted that I had brought
+the calumny upon myself.
+
+"But what can I do?" I asked.
+
+"Board her out with a suburban family, as you should have done
+from the first.  Even I, who am not strait-laced, consider it
+highly improper for you to have her alone with you in the house."
+
+"My dear," said I, "there is Antoinette."
+
+"Tush"--or something like it--said Judith.
+
+"And Stenson.  No one seeing Stenson could doubt the
+irreproachable propriety of his master."
+
+"I really have no patience with you," said Judith.
+
+It is hopeless to discuss Carlotta with her.  I shall do it no
+more.
+
+We sat for a while under the trees, and conversed on rational
+topics.  She likes her employment with Willoughby.  The morning
+she spends among blue books and other waste matter at the British
+Museum, and she devotes the evening to sorting her information.
+Willoughby commends her highly.
+
+"And there is something I know you'll be very pleased to hear,"
+she continued.  "Who do you think called on me yesterday?  Mrs.
+Willoughby.  Her husband wants me to spend August and September
+at a place they have taken in North Wales, and help him with his
+new book--as a private secretary, you know.  I said that I never
+went into society.  I must tell you this was the first time I had
+seen her.  She put her hand on my arm in the sweetest way in the
+world and said: 'I know all about it, my dear, and that is why I
+thought I'd come myself as Harold's ambassador.'  Wasn't it
+beautiful of her?"
+
+She looked at me and her eyes were filled with tears.
+
+"Marcus dear, I am not a bad woman, am I?"
+
+"My dearest," I answered, very deeply touched, "you are the best
+woman in the world.  So far from conferring a favour on you, Mrs.
+Willoughby has gained for herself the inestimable privilege of
+your friendship."
+
+"Ah!" said Judith, "a man cannot tell what it means."
+
+Really men are not such dullard dunderheads as women are pleased
+to imagine.  I have the most crystalline perception of what Mrs.
+Willoughby's invitation means to Judith.  Women appear to find a
+morbid satisfaction in the fiction that their sex is actuated by
+a mysterious nexus of emotions and motives which the grosser
+sense of man is powerless to appreciate.  In her heart of hearts
+it is a prodigious comfort to a woman to feel herself
+misunderstood.  Even she who is most perfectly mated, and is
+intellectually convinced that the difference of sex is no barrier
+to his complete knowledge of her, loves to cherish some little
+secret bit of her nature, to which _he_, on account of his
+masculinity, will be eternally blind.  Of course there are
+dull men who could not understand a tabbycat or a professional
+cricketer, let alone an expert autothaumaturgist--a
+self-mystery-maker--like a woman.  But an intelligent and
+painstaking man should find no difficulty in appreciating what,
+after all, is merely a point of view; for what women see from that
+point of view they are as indiscreet in revealing as a two-year-old
+babe.   I have confessed before that I do not understand Judith
+--that is to say the whole welter of contradictions in which her ego
+consists--but that is solely because I have not taken the trouble
+to subject her to special microscopic study.  Such a scientific
+analysis would, I think, be an immodest discourtesy towards any
+lady of my acquaintance, especially towards one for whom I bear
+considerable affection.  It would be as unwarrantable for a
+decent-minded man to speculate upon her exact spiritual
+dimensions as upon those portions of her physical frame that are
+hidden beneath her attire.  The charm of human intercourse rests,
+to a great extent, on the vague, the deliberately unperceived,
+the stimulating sense that an individual possesses more
+attributes than flash upon the bodily or mental eye.  But this, I
+say, is deliberate.  One knows perfectly well that beneath her
+skirts any young woman you please does not melt away into the
+scaly tail of a mermaid, but has a pair of ordinary commonplace
+legs.  One knows that when she has passed through certain well
+defined experiences in life, a certain definite range of
+sentiments must exist behind whatever mask of facial expression
+she may choose to adopt.  It is sheer nonsense, therefore, for
+Judith to say that I cannot enter into her feelings with regard
+to Mrs. Willoughby's invitation.
+
+I developed this theme very fully to Judith as we sat in
+Kensington Gardens and during our subsequent, stroll diagonally
+through Hyde Park to the Marble Arch.  She listened with great
+attention, and when I had finished regarded me in a pitying
+manner, a smile flickering over her lips.
+
+"My dear Marcus," she said, "there is no man, however
+humble-minded, who has not one colossal vanity, his knowledge
+of women.  He, at any rate, has established the veritable Theory
+of Women.   And we laugh at you, my good friend, for the more
+you expound, the more do you reveal your beautiful and artistic
+ignorance.  Oh, Marcus, the idea of you setting up as a feminine
+psychologist."
+
+"And pray, why not?" I asked, somewhat nettled.
+
+"Because you are that dear, impossible, lovable thing known as
+Marcus Ordeyne."
+
+This was exceedingly pretty of Judith.  But really woman is the
+Eternal Philistine, as Matthew Arnold has defined the term.  Her
+supreme characteristic is inconvincibility.  I had simply wasted
+my breath.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XII
+
+
+August 3d.
+
+_Etretat, Seine-Injerieure_:--A young fellow on the Casino
+terrace this evening caught my eye, looked at me queerly, and
+passed on.  His face, though unfamiliar, stirred some dormant
+association.  What was it?  The profitless question pestered me
+for hours.  At last, during the performance at the theatre, I
+slapped my knee and said aloud
+
+"I've got it!"
+
+"What?" asked Carlotta in alarm.
+
+"A fly," I answered.  Whereat Carlotta laughed, and bent forward
+to get a view of the victim.  I austerely directed her attention
+to the stage.  It was a metaphorical fly whose buzzing I had
+stopped.
+
+The young fellow was he who had pointed me out in Hyde Park to
+his companion, and lightly assured her that I was as mad as a
+dingo dog.  From the moment after the phrase's utterance to that
+of the slapping of my knee, it had been altogether absent from my
+mind.  Now it haunts me.  It reiterates itself after the manner
+of a glib phrase.  I am glad I am not in a railway carriage; the
+cranks would amuse the wheels with it all night long.  As it is,
+the surf tries to thunder it out on the shingle just a few yards
+away from my window.  I keep asking myself: why a dingo dog?  If
+I am mad it is in a gentle, Jaquesian, melancholy manner.  I do
+not dash at life, rabid and foaming at the mouth.
+
+I think the idiot simile must have been merely the misuse of
+language so common among the half-educated youth of Great
+Britain.
+
+Yet when I come to consider my present condition, I have
+doubts as to my complete sanity.  Here am I, in a little,
+semi-fashionable French seaside place, away from my books and
+my comforts and my habits, as much interested in its vapid
+distractions as if the universe held no other pursuits worth the
+attention of a rational man.  And I have been here a calendar
+month.
+
+To please Carlotta I wear white duck trousers, a pink shirt, and
+a yachting-cap.  I wired for them to my London tailor and they
+arrived within a week.  The first time I appeared in the maniacal
+costume I slunk from the stony stare of a gendarme, as I was
+about to ascend the Casino steps, and hid myself among the
+fishing-boats lower down on the beach.  Carlotta, however, was
+delighted and said that I looked pretty.  Now I have grown
+callous, seeing other fools similarly apparelled.  But a year
+ago, should I have dreamed it possible for me to strut about a
+fashionable _plage_ in white ducks, a pink shirt, and a
+yachting-cap?  I trow not.  They are signs of some sort of madness
+--whether that of a Jaques or a dingo dog matters very little.
+
+Pasquale was the main cause of my taking Carlotta away from
+London.  He came far too frequently to the house, established far
+too great a familiarity with my little girl.  She quoted him far
+too readily.  She is at the impressionable age when young women
+fall easy victims to the allurements of a fascinating creature
+like Pasquale.  If he showed himself in the light of a possible
+husband for Carlotta, I should have nothing to say.  I should
+give the pair my paternal benediction.  But I know my Renaissance
+and I know my Pasquale.  Carlotta is merely a new sensation--that's
+all he seems to live for, the delectable scoundrel.  But I am not
+going to have her heart broken  by any cinquecento wolf in
+Poole's clothing.  I assume that Carlotta has a heart, even if
+she is not possessed of a soul.  As to the latter I am still in
+doubt.  At all events I resolved to withdraw Carlotta from his
+influence, put her in fresh surroundings, and allow her to mix
+more freely among men and women, so as to divert and possibly
+improve her mind.
+
+I perceive that Carlotta is becoming an occupation.  Well, she is
+quite as profitable as collecting postage-stamps, or golf, or
+amateur photography.
+
+I have spent a pleasant month in this little place.  It is the
+mouth of a gorge in the midst of a cliff-bound coast.  The bay,
+but a quarter of a mile in sweep, is shut in at each end by a
+projecting wall of cliff cut by a natural arch.  Half the shingle
+beach is given up to fisherfolk and their boats and tarred Noah's
+arks where they keep their nets.  The other half suddenly rises
+into a digue or terrace on which is built a primitive casino, and
+below the terrace are the bathing-cabins.  We are staying at the
+most spotlessly clean of all clean French hotels.  There are no
+carpets on the stairs; but if one mounts them in muddy boots, an
+untiring chambermaid emerges from a lair below, with hot water
+and scrubbing-brush and smilingly removes the traces of one's
+passage.  Carlotta and Antoinette have adjoining rooms in the
+main building.  I inhabit the annexe, sleeping in a quaint,
+clean, bare little chamber with a balconied window that looks
+over the Noah's Arks and the fishing-smacks and fisherfolk, away
+out to sea.  This morning as I lay in bed I saw our Channel fleet
+lie along the arc of the horizon.
+
+Antoinette dwells in continuous rapture at being in France again.
+Carlotta assures me that the smile does not leave her great red
+face even as she sleeps of nights.  It is a little jest between
+us.  She peeped in once to see.  The good soul has filled herself
+up with French conversation as a starving hen gorges herself with
+corn.  She has scraped acquaintance with every washerwoman,
+fish-wife, _marchande_, bathing woman and domestic servant on the
+beach.  She is on intimate terms with the whole male native
+population.  When the three of us happen to walk together it is a
+triumphal progress of bows and grins and nods.  At first I
+thought it was I for whom this homage was intended.  I was soon
+undeceived.  It was Antoinette.  She loves to parade Carlotta
+before her friends.  I came upon her once entertaining an
+admiring audience in Carlotta's presence with a detailed
+description of that young woman's physical perfections--a
+description which was marked by a singular lack of reticence.
+The time of her glory is the bathing hour, when she accompanies
+Carlotta from her cabin to the water's edge, divests her of
+_peignoir_ and _espadrilles_, but before revealing her to
+fashionable Etretat, casts a preliminary glance around, as who
+should say: "Prepare all men and women for the dazzling goddess I
+am about to unveil."  Carlotta is undoubtedly bewitching in her
+bathing costume, and enjoys a little triumph of beauty.  People
+fall into a natural group in order to look at her, while I,
+sitting on a camp-stool in my white ducks and pink shirt and
+smoking a cigarette, cannot repress a complacent pride of
+ownership.  I do not object to her flicking her wet fingers at me
+when she comes dripping out of the sea; and I do not even
+reproach her when she puts her foot upon my sartorially
+immaculate knee, to show me a pebble-cut on her glistening pink
+sole.
+
+Her conduct has been exemplary.  I have allowed her to make the
+acquaintance of two or three young fellows, her partners at the
+Casino dances, and she walks up and down the terrace with them
+before meals.  I have forbidden her, under penalty of immediate
+return to London and of my eternal displeasure, to mention the
+harem at Alexandretta.  Young fellows are gifted with a genius
+for misapprehension.  She is an ordinary young English lady, an
+orphan (which is true), and I am her guardian.  Of course she
+looks at them with imploring eyes, and pulls them by the sleeve,
+and handles the lappels of their coats, and admits them to terms
+of the frankest intimacy; but I can no more change these
+characteristics than I can alter the shape of her body.  She is
+the born coquette.  Her delighted conception of herself is that
+she is the object of every man's admiration.  I noticed her this
+morning playing a tune with her fingers on the old bathing-man's
+arm, as he was preparing to take her into the water, and I saw
+his mahogany face soften.  In her indescribable childish way she
+would coquet with a tax-collector or a rag-and-bone man or the
+Archbishop of Canterbury.  But she has committed no grave
+indiscretion, and I am sufficiently her lord and master to exact
+obedience.
+
+I pretend, however, to be at her beck and call, and it is a
+delight to minister to her radiant happiness--to feel her lean on
+my arm and hear her cooing voice say:
+
+"You are so good.  I should like to kiss you."
+
+But I do not allow her to kiss me.  Never again.
+
+
+"Seer Marcous, let us go to the little horses."
+
+She has a consuming passion for _petits chevaux_.  I speak sagely
+of the evils of gambling.  She laughs.  I weakly take lower
+ground.
+
+"What is the good?  You have no money."
+
+"Oh-h!  But only two francs," she says, holding out her hand.
+
+"Not one.  Yesterday you lost."
+
+"But to-day I shall win.  I want to give you something I saw in a
+shop.  Oh, a beautiful thing."  Then I feel a hand steal into the
+pocket of my dinner jacket where I carry loose silver for this
+very purpose, just as a lover of horses carries lumps of sugar
+for the nose of a favourite pony, and immediately it is withdrawn
+with a cry of joy and triumph, and she skips back out of my
+reach.  Then she takes my arm and leads me from the sweet
+night-air into the hot little room with its crowd around the
+nine gyrating animals.
+
+"I shall put it on 5.  I always put on 5.  He is a nice, clean,
+white, pretty horse."
+
+She stakes two francs, watches the turn in a tense agony of
+excitement; she wins, comes running to me with sixteen francs
+clutched tight in her hand.
+
+"See.  I said I should win."
+
+"Come away then and be happy."
+
+But she makes a protesting grimace, and before I can stop her,
+runs back to stake again on 5.  In twenty minutes she is ruined
+and returns to me wearing an expression of abject misery.  She is
+too desolate even to try the fortune of the dinner-jacket pocket.
+I take her outside and restore her to beatitude with grenadine
+syrup and soda-water.  She rejects the straws.  With her elbows
+on the marble table, the glass held in both hands, she drinks
+sensuously, in little sips.
+
+And I, Marcus Ordeyne, sit by watching her, a most contented
+philosopher of forty.  A dingo dog could not be so contented.
+That young fellow, I unhesitatingly assert, must be the most
+brainless of his type.  I suffer fools gladly, as a general rule,
+but if I see much of this one I shall do him some injury.
+
+
+After dejeuner we strolled to the top of the west cliff and lay
+on the thick dry grass.  The earth has never known a more perfect
+afternoon.  A day of turquoise and diamond.
+
+The air itself was diaphanous blue.  Below us the tiny place
+slumbered in the sunshine; scarcely a sign of life save specks of
+washer-women on the beach bending over white patches which we
+knew were linen spread out to dry.  The ebb-tide lapped lazily on
+the shingle, where the sea changed suddenly from ultramarine to a
+fringe of feathery white.  A white sail or two flecked the blue
+of the bay.  A few white wisps of cirrus gleamed above our heads.
+Around us, on the cliff-tops, the green pastures and meadows and,
+farther inland, the cornfields stacked in harvest, and great
+masses of trees.  Lying on our backs, between sea and sky, we
+seemed utterly alone.  Carlotta and I were the sole inhabitants
+of the earth.  I dreamily disintegrated caramels from their
+sticky tissue-paper wrappings for Carlotta's consumption.
+
+After a while unconquerable drowsiness crept over me; and a
+little later I had an odd sense of perfect quietude.  I was lying
+amid moss and violets.  In a languorous way I wondered how my
+surroundings had changed, and at last I awoke to find my head
+propped on Carlotta's lap and shaded by her red parasol, while
+she sat happy in full sunshine.  I was springing from this
+posture of impropriety when she laughed and laid restraining
+hands on my shoulders.
+
+"No.  You must not move.  You look so pretty.  And it is so nice.
+I put your head there so that it should be soft.  You have been
+sound asleep."
+
+"I have also been abominably impolite," said I.  "I humbly beg
+your pardon, Carlotta."
+
+"Oh, I am not cross," she laughed.  Then still keeping her hands
+on me, she settled her limbs into a more comfortable position.
+
+"There!  Now I can play at being a good little Turkish wife."
+She fashioned into a fan the _Matin_ newspaper, which I had
+bought for the luxurious purpose of not reading, and fanned me.
+"That is what Ayesha used to do to Hamdi.  And Ayesha used to
+tell him stories.  But my lord does not like his slave's stories."
+
+"Decidedly not," said I.
+
+I have heard much of Ayesha, a pretty animal organism who appears
+to have turned her elderly husband into a doting fool.  I am
+beginning to have a contempt for Hamdi Effendi.
+
+"They are what you call improper, eh?" she laughed, referring to
+the tales.  "I will sing you a Turkish song which you will not
+understand."
+
+"Is it a suitable song?"
+
+"Kim bilir--who knows?" said Carlotta.
+
+She began a melancholy, crooning, guttural ditty; but broke off
+suddenly.
+
+"Oh!  but it is stupid.  Like the Turkish dancing.  Oh,
+everything in Alexandretta was stupid!  Sometimes I think I have
+never seen Alexandretta--or Ayesha--or Hamdi.  I think I always
+am with you."
+
+This must be so, as of late she has spoken little of her harem
+life; she talks chiefly of the small daily happenings, and
+already we have a store of common interests.  The present is her
+whole existence; the past but a confused dream.  The odd part of
+the matter is that she regards her position with me as a
+perfectly natural one.  No stray kitten adopted by a kind family
+could have less sense of obligation, or a greater faith in the
+serene ordering of the cosmos for its own private and peculiar
+comfort.  When I asked her a while ago what she would have done
+had I left her on the bench in the Embankment Gardens, she
+shrugged her shoulders and answered, as she had done before, that
+either she would have died or some other nice gentleman would
+have taken care of her.
+
+"Do you think nice gentlemen go about London looking for homeless
+little girls?" I asked on that occasion.
+
+"All gentlemen like beautiful girls," she replied, which brought
+us to an old argument.
+
+This afternoon, however, we did not argue.  The day forbade it.
+I lay with my head on Carlotta's lap, looking up into the deep
+blue, and feeling a most curious sensation of positive happiness.
+My attitude towards life has hitherto been negative.  I have
+avoided more than I have sought.  I have not drunk deep of life
+because I have been unathirst.  To me--
+
+               "To stand aloof and view the fight
+               Is all the pleasure of the game."
+
+My interest even in Judith has been of a detached nature.  I have
+been like Faust.  I might have said:
+
+               _"Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen
+               Werweile doch!  Du bist so schon!_
+
+Then may the devil take me and do what he likes with me!"
+
+I have never had the least inclination to apostrophise the moment
+in this fashion and request it to tarry on account of its
+exceeding charm.  Never until this afternoon, when the deep
+summer enchantment of the turquoise day was itself ensorcelised
+by the witchery of a girl's springtide.
+
+"You have three, four, five--oh, such a lot of grey hairs," said
+Carlotta, looking down on my reclining head.
+
+"Many people have grey hair at twenty," said I.
+
+"But I have none."
+
+"You are not yet twenty, Carlotta."
+
+"Do you think I will have them then?  Oh, it would be dreadful.
+No one would care to have me."
+
+"And I?  Am I thus the object of every one's disregard?"
+
+"Oh, you--you are a man.  It is right for a man.  It makes him
+look wise.  His wife says, 'Behold, my husband has grey hair.  He
+has wisdom.  If I am not good he will beat me.  So I must obey
+him."'
+
+"She wouldn't run off with a good-for-nothing scamp of
+two-and-twenty?"
+
+"Oh, no-o," said Carlotta.  "She would not be so wicked."
+
+"I am glad," said I, "that you think a sense of conjugal duty is
+an ineradicable element of female nature.  But suppose she fell
+in love with the young scamp?"
+
+"Men fall in love," she replied sagely.  "Women only fall in love
+in stories--Turkish stories.  They love their husbands."
+
+"You amaze me," said I.
+
+Ye-es," said Carlotta.
+
+"But in England, a man wants a woman to love him before he
+marries her."
+
+"How can she?" asked Carlotta.
+
+This was a staggering question.
+
+"I don't know," said I, "but she dus."
+
+"Then before I marry a man in England I must love him?  But I
+shall die without a husband!"
+
+"I don't think so," said I.
+
+"I must begin soon," said Carlotta, with a laugh.
+
+A sinuous motion of her serpentine young body enabled her to bend
+her face down to mine.
+
+"Shall I love Seer Marcous?  But how shall I know when I am in
+love?"
+
+"When you appreciate the exceeding impropriety of discussing the
+matter with your humble servant," I replied.
+
+"When a girl is in love she does not speak about it?"
+
+"No, my dear.  She lets concealment like a worm i' the bud feed
+on her damask cheek."
+
+"Then she gets ugly?"
+
+"That's it," I answered.  "You keep on looking in the glass, and
+when you perceive you are hideous then you'll know you are in
+love."
+
+"But when I am so ugly you will not want me," she objected.  "So
+it is no use falling in love with you."
+
+"You have a more logical mind than I imagined," said I.
+
+"What is a logical mind?" asked Carlotta.
+
+"It is the antiseptic which destroys the bacilli of unreason
+whereby true happiness is vivified."
+
+"I do not understand," she said.
+
+"I should be vastly surprised if you did," I laughed.
+
+"Would you like me to marry and go away and leave you?" asked
+Carlotta, after a long pause.
+
+"I suppose," I said with a sigh, "that some tin-pot knight will
+drive up one of these days to the castle in a hansom-cab and
+carry off my princess."
+
+"Then you'll be sorry?"
+
+"My dear," I answered, "do not let us discuss such gruesome
+things on an afternoon like this."
+
+"You would like better for me to go on playing at being your
+Turkish wife?"
+
+"Infinitely," said I.
+
+
+Alas!  The day is sped.  I have asked the fleeting moment to
+tarry, and it laughed, and shook its gossamer wings at me, and
+flew by on its mad race into eternity.
+
+
+As we lay, a cicada set up its shrilling quite close to us.  I
+slipped my head from Carlotta's lap and idly parted the rank
+grass in search of the noisy intruder, and by good luck I found
+him.  I beckoned Carlotta, who glided down, and there, with our
+heads together and holding our breath, we watched the queerest
+little love drama imaginable.  Our cicada stood alert and spruce,
+waving his antenna with a sort of cavalier swagger, and every now
+and then making his corslet vibrate passionately.  On the top of
+a blade of grass sat a brown little Juliet--a most reserved,
+discreet little Juliet, but evidently much interested in Romeo's
+serenade.  When he sang she put her head to one side and moved as
+if uncertain whether to descend from her balcony.  When he
+stopped, which he did at frequent intervals, being as it were
+timorous and tongue-tied, she took her foot from the ladder and
+waited, at first patiently and then with an obvious air of
+boredom.  Messer Romeo made a hop forward and vibrated; Juliet
+grew tremulous.  Alarmed at his boldness he halted and made a hop
+back; Juliet looked disappointed.  At last another cicada set up
+a louder note some yards away and, without a nod or a sign,
+Juliet skipped off into space, leaving the most disconsolate
+little Romeo of a grasshopper you ever beheld.  He gave vent to a
+dismal failure of a vibration and hopped to the foot of the
+faithless lady's bower.
+
+Carlotta broke into a merry laugh and clapped her hands.
+
+"I am so glad."
+
+"She is the most graceless hussy imaginable," I cried.  "There
+was he grinding his heart out for her, and just because a more
+brazen-throated scoundrel came upon the scene she must needs
+leave our poor friend in the lurch.  She has no more heart than
+my boot, and she will come to a bad end."
+
+"But he was such a fool," retorted my sage damsel, with a flash
+of laughter in her dark eyes.  "If he wanted her, why didn't he
+go up and take her?"
+
+"Because he is a gentleman, a cicada of fine and delicate
+feeling."
+
+"_Hou!_" laughed Carlotta.  "He was a fool.  It served him right.
+She grew tired of waiting."
+
+"You believe, then," said I, "in marriage by capture?"
+
+I explained and discoursed to her of the matrimonial habits of
+the Tartar tribes.
+
+"Yes," said Carlotta.  "That is sense.  And it must be such fun
+for the girl.  All that, what you call it?--wooing?--is waste of
+time.  I like things to happen, quick, quick, one after the
+other--or else--"
+
+"Or else what?"
+
+"To do nothing, nothing but lie in the sun, like this afternoon."
+
+"Yes," said I dreamily, after I had again thrown myself by her
+side.  "Like this afternoon."
+
+
+I sit at my window and look out upon the strip of beach, the
+hauled-up fishing boats and the nets hung out to dry looming
+vague in the starlight, and I hear the surf's rhythmical moan a
+few yards beyond; and it beats into my ears the idiot phrase that
+has recurred all the evening.
+
+But why should I be mad?  For filling my soul with God's utmost
+glory of earth and sea and sky?  For filling my heart with purest
+pleasure in the intimate companionship of fresh and fragrant
+maidenhood?  For giving myself up for once to a dream of sense
+clouded by never a thought that was not serenely fair?
+
+For feeling young again?
+
+
+I shall read myself to sleep with _La Dame de Monsoreau_, which I
+have procured from the circulating library in the Rue Alphonse
+Karr--(the literary horticulturist is the genius loci and the
+godfather of my landlady)--and I will empty flagons with Pere
+Gorenflot and ride on errands of life and death with Chicot,
+prince of jesters, and walk lovingly between the valiant Bussy
+and Henri Quatre.  By this, if by nothing else, I recognise the
+beneficence of the high gods--they have given us tired men Dumas.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+September 30th.
+
+Something is wrong with Antoinette.  The dinner she served up
+this evening was all but uneatable.  Something is wrong with
+Stenson, who has taken to playing his lugubrious hymn-tunes on
+the concertina while I am in the house; I won't have it.
+Something is wrong with the cat.  He wanders round the house like
+a lost soul, sniffing at everything.  This evening he actually
+jumped onto the dinner-table, looked at me out of his one eye, in
+which all the desolation of two was concentrated, and miaowed
+heart-rendingly in my face.  Something is wrong with the house,
+with my pens which will not write, with my books which have the
+air of dry bones in a charnel-house, with the MS. of my History
+of Renaissance Morals, which stands on the writing-table like a
+dusty monument to the futility of human endeavour.  Something is
+wrong with me.
+
+Something, too, is wrong with Judith, who has just returned from
+her stay with the Willoughbys.  I have been to see her this
+evening and found her of uncertain temper, and inclined to be
+contradictious.  She accused me of being dull.  I answered that
+the autumn world outside was drenched with miserable rain.  How
+could man be sprightly under such conditions?
+
+"In this room," said Judith, "with its bright fire and drawn
+curtains there is no miserable rain, and no autumn save in our
+hearts."
+
+"Why in our hearts?" I asked.
+
+"How you peg one down to precision," said Judith, testily.  "I
+wish I were a Roman Catholic."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I could go into a convent."
+
+"You had much better go to Delphine Carrere," said I.
+
+"I have only been back a day, and you want to get rid of me
+already?" she cried, using her woman's swift logic of unreason.
+
+"I want you to be happy and contented, my dear Judith."
+
+"H'm," she said.
+
+Her slipper dangling as usual from the tip of her foot fell to
+the ground.  I declare I was only half conscious of the accident
+as my mind was deep in other things.
+
+"You don't even pick up my slipper," she said.
+
+"Ten thousand pardons," I exclaimed, springing forward.  But she
+had anticipated my intention.  We remained staring into the fire
+and saying nothing.  As she professed to be tired I went away
+early.
+
+At the front door of the mansions, finding I had left my umbrella
+behind, I remounted the stairs, and rang Judith's bell.  After a
+while I saw her figure through the ground-glass panel approach
+the door, but before she opened it, she turned out the light in
+the passage.
+
+"Marcus!" she cried, rather excitedly; and in the dimness of the
+threshold her eyes looked strangely accusative of tears.  "You
+have come back!"
+
+"Yes," said I, "for my umbrella."
+
+She looked at me for a moment, laughed, clapped her hands to her
+throat, turned away sharply, caught up my umbrella, and putting
+it into my hands and thrusting me back shut the door in my face.
+In great astonishment I went downstairs again.  What is wrong
+with Judith?  She said this evening that all men are cruel.  Now,
+I am a man.  Therefore I am cruel.  A perfect syllogism.  But how
+have I been cruel?
+
+I walked home.  There is nothing so consoling to the depressed
+man as the unmitigated misery of a walk through the London rain.
+One is not mocked by any factitious gaiety.  The mind is in
+harmony with the sodden universe.  It is well to have everything
+in the world wrong at one and the same time.
+
+
+I have changed my drenched garments for dressing-gown and
+slippers.  I find on my writing-table a letter addressed in a
+round childish hand.  It is from Carlotta, who for the last
+fortnight has been staying in Cornwall with the McMurrays.  I
+have known few fortnights so long.  In a ridiculous schoolboy
+way I have been counting the days to her return--the day after
+to-morrow.
+
+The letter begins: "Seer Marcous dear."  The spelling is a little
+jest between us.  The inversion is a quaint invention of her own.
+"Mrs. McMurray says, can you spare me for one more week?  She
+wants to teach me manners.  She says I have shocked the top priest
+here--oh, you call him a vikker--now I do remember--because I went
+out for a walk with a little young pretty priest without a hat,
+and because it rained I put on his hat and the vikker met us.  But
+I did not flirt with the little priest.  Oh, no!  I told him he
+must not make love to me like the young man from the grocer's.
+And I told him that if he wrote poetry you would beat him.  So I
+have been very good.  And darling Seer Marcous, I want to come
+back very much, but Mrs. McMurray says I must stay, and she is
+going to have a baby and I am very happy and good, and Mr. McMurray
+says funny things and makes me laugh.   But I love my darling Seer
+Marcous best.  Give Antoinette and Polifemus [the one-eyed cat)
+two very nice kisses for me.  And here is one for Seer Marcous
+from his
+                                                    "CARLOTTA."
+
+How can I refuse?  But I wish she were here.
+
+
+31st October.
+
+I did not sleep last night.  I have done no work to-day.  The
+Renaissance has receded into a Glacial Epoch wherein, as far as
+its humanity is concerned, I have not a tittle of interest.  I
+sought refuge in the club.  Why should an old sober University
+club be such a haven of unrest?  Ponting, an opinionated don of
+Corpus, seated himself at my luncheon table, and discoursed on
+political economy and golf.  I manifested a polite ignorance of
+these high matters.  He assured me that if I studied the one and
+played at the other, I should be physically and mentally more
+robust; whereupon he thumped his narrow chest, and put on a scowl
+of intellectuality.  I fear that Ponting, like most of the men
+here, studies golf and plays at political economy.  In serener
+moments I suffer Ponting gladly.  But to-day his boast that he
+had done the course at Westward Ho! in seven, or seventeen, or
+seventy--how on earth should I remember?--left me cold, and his
+crude economics interfered with my digestion.
+
+Strolling forlornly down Piccadilly I, came face to face with my
+sad-coloured Cousin Rosalie in a sad-coloured gown.  She gave me
+a hasty nod and would have passed on, but I arrested her.  Her
+white face was turned piteously upward and from her
+expressionless eyes flashed a glance of fear.  I felt myself in a
+brutal mood.
+
+"Why," I asked, "are you avoiding me as if I were a pestilence?"
+
+She murmured that she was not avoiding me, but was in a hurry.
+
+"I don't believe it," said I.  "People have been telling you that
+I am a vile, wicked man who does unspeakable things, and like a
+good little girl you are afraid to talk to me.  Tell people, the
+next time you see them, with my compliments, that they are
+malevolent geese."
+
+I lifted my hat and relieving Rosalie of my terrifying presence,
+walked away in dudgeon.  I felt abominably and unreasonably angry.
+I bethought me of my Aunt Jessica, whom I held responsible for
+her niece's behaviour.  A militant mood prompted a call.  After
+twenty minutes in a hansom I found myself in her drawing-room.
+She was alone, the girls being away on country- house visits.
+Her reception was glacial.  I expressed the hope that the
+yachting cruise had been a pleasant one.
+
+"Exceedingly pleasant," snapped my aunt.
+
+"I trust Dora is well," said I, keeping from my lips a smile that
+might have hinted at the broken heart.
+
+"Very well, thank you."
+
+As I do not enjoy a staccato conversation, I remained politely
+silent, inviting her by my attitude to speak.
+
+"I rather wonder, Marcus," she said at last, "at your referring
+to Dora."
+
+"Indeed?  May I ask why?"
+
+"May I speak plainly?"
+
+"I beseech you."
+
+"I have heard of you at Etretat with your ward."
+
+"Well?" I asked.
+
+"_Verbum sap_," said my aunt.
+
+"And you have let Mrs. Ralph and Rosalie know of my summer
+holiday and given them to understand that I am a monster of
+depravity.  I am exceedingly obliged to you.  I have just met
+Rosalie in the street, and she shrank from me as if I were the
+reincarnation of original sin."
+
+"I have no doubt that in her innocent mind you are," replied my
+Aunt Jessica.
+
+The indulgent smile wherewith she used to humour my
+eccentricities had gone, and her face was hard and unpitying.
+
+"I am glad I have such charitable-minded relations," said I.
+
+"I am a woman of the world," my aunt retorted, "but I think that
+when such things are flaunted in the face of society they become
+immoral."
+
+I rose.  "Do evil by stealth--as much as you like," said I, "but
+blush to find it fame."
+
+With a gesture my aunt assented to the proposition.
+
+"On the other hand," said I, heatedly, "I have been doing a
+certain amount of good both by stealth and openly, and I
+naturally blush with indignation to find it accounted infamous."
+
+I looked narrowly into my aunt's eyes and I read in them entire
+disbelief in my protest.  I swear, if I had proved my innocence
+beyond the shadow of doubt, that woman would have been grievously
+disappointed.
+
+"Good-bye," said I.
+
+She shook hands frigidly and turned to ring the bell.  A moment
+later--I really believe she was moved by a kindly impulse--she
+intercepted me at the door.
+
+"I know you are odd and quixotic, Marcus," she said in a softer
+tone.  "I hope you will do nothing rash."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked in a white heat of unreasonable rage.
+
+"I hope you won't try to repair things by marrying this--young
+person."
+
+"To make an honest woman of her, do you mean?"  I asked grimly.
+
+"Yes," said my aunt.
+
+Then suddenly the Devil leaped into me and stirred all the
+elements of unrest, anger, and longing together in a cauldron
+which I suppose was my heart.  The result was explosion.  I made
+a step forward with raised hands and my aunt recoiled in alarm.
+
+"By heaven!" I cried, "I would give the soul out of my body to
+marry her!"
+
+And I stumbled out of the house like a blind man.
+
+
+From that moment of dazzling revelation till now I have nursed
+this infinite desire.  To say that I love Carlotta is to express
+Niagara in terms of a fountain.  I crave her with everything
+vital in heart and brain.  She is an obsession.  The scent of her
+hair is in my nostrils, the cooing dove-notes of her voice murmur
+in my ears, I shut my eyes and feel the rose-petals of her lips
+on my cheek, the witchery of her movements dances before my eyes.
+
+I cannot live without her.  Until to-day the house was desolate
+enough--a ghostly shell of a habitation.  Henceforward, without
+her my very life will be void.  My heart has been crying for her
+these two weeks and I knew it not.  Now I know.  I could stand on
+my balcony and lift up my hands toward the south where she
+abides, and lift up my voice, and cry for her passionately aloud.
+There is no infernal foolishness in the world that I could not
+commit tonight.  The maddest dingo dog, if he could appreciate my
+state of being, would learn points in insanity.
+
+
+It is two o'clock.  I must go to sleep.  I take from my shelves
+Epictetus, who might be expected to throw cold water on the most
+burning fever of the mind.  I have not read far before I come
+across this consolatory apophthegm: "The contest is unequal
+between a charming girl and a beginner in philosophy."  He is
+mocking me, the cold-blooded pedagogue!  I throw his book across
+the room.  But he is right.  I am but a beginner in philosophy.
+No armour wherein my reason can invest me is of avail against
+Carlotta.  I have no strength to smite.  I am helpless.
+
+But by heaven! Am I mad?  Is not this on the contrary the sanest
+hour of my existence?  I have lived like an automaton for forty
+years, and I suddenly awake to find myself a man.  I don't care
+whether I sleep or not.  I feel gloriously, exultingly young.  I
+am but twenty.  As I have never lived, I have never grown old.
+Life translates itself into music--a wild "Invitation to the
+Waltz" by some Archangel Weber.  I laugh out loud.  Polyphemus,
+who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from
+Carlotta's corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and
+grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops.
+Heigh, old boy?  Do the pulsations of the music throb in your
+veins, too?  Come along and let us make a night of it.  To the
+Devil with sleep.  We'll go together down to the cellar and find
+a bottle of Pommery, and we will drink to Life and Youth and Love
+and the Splendour and the Joy thereof.
+
+He utters a little cry of delight and frisks around me.  In the
+blackness of the cellar his one eye gleams like a star and he
+purrs unutterable rapture.  My hand passed over his back produces
+a shower of sparks.  We return up the silent stairs, I carry a
+bottle of Pommery and a milkjug--for you shall revel, too,
+Polyphemus; and as I have forgotten to bring a saucer, you shall
+drink, as no cat has drunk before, from an old precious platter
+bearing the arms of the Estes of Ferrara--over which Lucrezia
+Borgia laughed when the world was young.  It is a pity cats don't
+drink champagne.  I would have made you to-night as drunk as
+Bacchus.  We drink, and in the stillness the glouglou of his
+tongue forms a bass to the elfin notes of the Pommery in the
+soda-water tumbler.
+
+Ha!  Twin purveyors of the milk of paradise, I wonder like Omar
+what you buy one-half so precious as the stuff you sell.  Motor-
+cars for Mrs. Pommery and cakes for the little Grenos?  I do not
+like to regard you as common humans addicted to silk hats and
+umbrellas and the other vices of respectability.  Ye are rather
+beneficent demigods, Castor and Pollux of the vine, dream
+entities who pour from the sunset lands of Nowhere the liquid
+gold of life's joyousness.
+
+A few words scribbled on this telegraph form would bring her here
+tomorrow night.  But no.  What is a week?  Leaden-footed, it is
+an eternity; but winged with the dove's iris it is a mere moment.
+Besides, I must accustom myself to my youth.  I must investigate
+its follies, I must learn the grammar of its wisdom.  We'll take
+counsel together, Polyphemus, how to turn these chambers, fusty
+with decayed thought, into a bridal bower radiant and fragrant
+with innumerable loves.  Let us drink again to her witchery.  It
+is her breath itself distilled by the Heavenly Twins that foams
+against my lips.  I would give the soul out of my body to marry
+her, did I say?  It were like buying her for a farthing.  I would
+pledge the soul of the universe for a kiss.
+
+I catch up Polyphemus under the arm-pits, and his hind legs
+dangle.  He continues to lick his chops and looks at me
+sardonically.  He is stolid over his cups--which is somewhat
+disappointing.  No matter; he can be shaken into enthusiasm.
+
+"I care not," I cry, "for man or devil, Polyphemus.
+
+        _'Que je suis grand ici!  mon amour de feu
+          Va de pair cette nuit avec celui de Dieu!'_
+
+You may say that it's wrong, that the first line is a syllable
+short, and that Triboulet said _'colere'_ instead of _amour_.
+You always were a dry-as-dust, pedantic prig.  But I say _amour_-
+love, do you hear?  I'll translate, if you like:
+
+             'Now am I mighty, and my love of fire
+            To-night goes  even with a god's desire.'
+
+Yes; I'll be a poet even though you do scratch my wrist with your
+hind claws, Polyphemus."
+
+There!  Empty your milk-jug and I will empty my bottle.  The wine
+smells of hyacinth.  It is a revelation.  Her hair smells of
+violets, but it is the delicate odour of hyacinth that came from
+her bare young arms when she clasped them round my neck; _et sa
+peau, on dirait du satin_.  Carlotta is in the wine, Carlotta
+with her sorcery and her laughter and her youth, and I drink
+Carlotta.
+
+              _"Quo me rapis Bacche pienum tui?"_
+
+To such a land of dreams, my one-eyed friend, as never before
+have I visited.  You yawn?  You are bored?  I shoot the dregs of
+my glass into his distended jaws.  He springs away spitting and
+coughing, and I lie back in my chair convulsed with
+inextinguishable laughter.
+
+
+October 2d.
+
+I have suffered all day from a racking headache, having awakened
+at six o'clock and crept shivering to bed.  I realise that
+Pommery and Greno are not demi-gods at all, but mere commercial
+purveyors of a form of alcohol, a quart of which it is
+injudicious to imbibe, with a one-eyed tom-cat as boon companion,
+at two o'clock in the morning:
+
+But I am unrepentant.  If I committed follies last night, so much
+the better.  I struggle no longer against the inevitable, when
+the inevitable is the crown and joy of earthly things.  For in
+sober truth I love her infinitely.
+
+
+October 6th.
+
+She comes back to-morrow.  Antoinette and I have been devising a
+welcome.  The good soul has filled the house with flowers, and,
+usurping Stenson's functions, has polished furniture and book
+backs and silver and has hung fresh blinds and scrubbed and
+scoured until I am afraid to walk about or sit down lest I should
+tarnish the spotless brightness of my surroundings.
+
+"You have forgotten one thing, Antoinette," I remarked,
+satirically.  "You have omitted to strew the front steps with
+rose-leaves."
+
+"I would cover them with my body for the dear angel to walk upon
+as she entered," said Antoinette.
+
+"That would scarcely be rose-leaves," I murmured.
+
+Antoinette laughed.  "And Monsieur then!  He is just as bad.  Has
+he not put new curtains in the room of Mademoiselle, and a new
+toilette table, and a set of silver brushes and combs and I know
+not what, as for the toilette of a princess?  And the eiderdown
+in pink satin?  _Regardez-moi ca!_  Monsieur can no longer say
+that it is I alone who spoil the dear angel."
+
+"Monsieur," said I, at a loss for a better retort, "will say
+whatever Monsieur pleases."
+
+"It is indeed the right of Monsieur," said Antoinette,
+respectfully, but with a twinkle in her eye not devoid of
+significance.
+
+does the crafty old woman suspect?  Perhaps my preparations for
+Carlotta's return have been inordinate, for they have extended to
+the transformation of the sitting-room downstairs into a lady's
+boudoir.  I have been busy this happy week.  But what care I?  It
+will not be long before I have to say to her, "Antoinette, there
+is going to be a wedding."
+
+I must be on my guard lest, in the transports of her joy, she
+clasp me to her capacious bosom.!
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+October 7th.
+
+At Paddington I came upon Sebastian Pasquale lounging about the
+arrival platform.  As I had not seen or heard of him since the
+end of July I had concluded that he was wandering as usual over
+the globe.  He greeted me effusively, holding out both hands in
+his foreign fashion.
+
+"My dear old Ordeyne! who would have thought of meeting you here?
+What wind blows you to Paddington?"
+
+"I expect Carlotta by the Plymouth Express."
+
+"The fair Carlotta?  And how is she?  And what is she doing at
+Plymouth?"
+
+In the middle of my explanation he pulled out his watch.
+
+"By Jove!  I must get to the next platform and catch my train to
+Ealing.  I was just killing time about the station.  I like
+seeing a train come in--the gleam and smoke and rush and whirr of
+the evil-looking thing--and the sudden metamorphosis of its sleek
+sides into mouths belching forth humanity.  I think of Hades.
+This, by the way, isn't a bad representation of it--the up-to-
+date Hades.  They've got a railway bridge now across the Styx,
+and Charon has a gold band around his cap, and this might be the
+arrival platform of the damned souls."
+
+"You forget," said I, "that it is the arrival platform of
+Carlotta."
+
+He threw back his head and laughed boyishly.
+
+"Well, consider it the Golden Gate terminus of the 'Earth, Hades
+and Olympus Railway' if you like.  I'm off on a branch line to
+meet a beauteous duchessa at Ealing--oh, an authentic one, I
+assure you."
+
+"Why should I doubt it?" said I.
+
+Stenson, whom I had brought to look after Carlotta's luggage,
+came up and touched his hat.
+
+"Train just signalled, sir."
+
+Pasquale put out his hand after another glance at his watch.
+
+"I am sorry I cannot wait to greet the fair one.  I'll drop in
+soon and pay my respects.  I am only just back in London, you
+know. _A rivederci._"
+
+He waved me farewell and hurried off.  The arrival of the train,
+the exuberance of Carlotta, the joy of having her sidle up
+against me once more in the cab while she poured out her story,
+and the subsequent gaiety of the evening banished Pasquale from
+my mind.  But it is odd that I should have met him at Paddington.
+
+We parted on the landing to dress for dinner.  A moment
+afterwards there was a beating at my door.  I opened it to
+behold Carlotta, in a glow of wondering delight, brandishing a
+silver-backed brush in one hand and the hand-mirror in the other.
+
+"Oh, my darling Seer Marcous!  For me?  All that for me?"
+
+"No.  It is for Antoinette," said I.
+
+"Oh-h!"
+
+She laughed and pulled me by the arm into her room and shut the
+door.
+
+"Oh, everything is beautiful, beautiful, and I shall die if I do
+not kiss you."
+
+"You must be kept alive at all hazards," I laughed; and this time
+I did not reject her.  But it was a child around whom my arms
+closed.  An inner flash, accompanied by a spasm of pain, revealed
+it, and changed a passionate desire to gentleness.
+
+"There," said I, after she had released herself and flown to open
+the drawers of the new toilette table, where lay some odds and
+ends of jewelry I had purchased for her.  "You have been saved
+from extinction.  The next deadly peril is hunger.  I give you a
+quarter of an hour."
+
+She came down to dinner in a low-necked frock, wearing the
+necklace and bangle; and, child that she is, in her hand she
+carried the silver-backed mirror.  I believe she has taken it to
+bed with her, as a seven-year-old does its toy.  She certainly
+kept it by her all the evening and admired herself therein
+unashamedly like the traditional Lady from the Sea.  Once,
+desiring to show me the ravishing beauty of a turquoise pendant,
+she bent her neck forward, as I sat, so as to come within reach
+of my nearsighted eyes (it is a superstition of hers that I am
+nearly blind without my glasses), and quite naturally slid onto
+my knee.  She has the warm russet complexion that suits her heavy
+bronze hair, and there is a glow beneath the satin of her neck
+and arms.  And she is fragrant--I recognise it now--of hyacinths.
+The world can hold nothing more alluring to the senses of man.
+My fingers that held the turquoise trembled as they chanced to
+touch her--but she was all unconcerned.  Nay, further--she gazed
+into the mirror--
+
+"It makes me look so white--oh, there was a girl at Bude who had
+a gold locket--and it lay upon her bones--you could count them.
+I am glad I have no bones.  I am quite soft--feel."
+
+She clasped my fingers and pressed their tips into the firm young
+flesh below her throat.
+
+"Yes," said I, with some huskiness in my voice, "your turquoise
+can sleep there very pleasantly.  See, I will kiss it to bring
+you good luck."
+
+She cooed with pleasure.  "I don't think any one kissed the locket
+of the girl at Bude.  She was too thin.  And too old; she must
+have been thirty!  Now," she added, lifting up the locket, "you
+will kiss the place, too, where it is to lie."
+
+I looked for a moment into her eyes.  Seeing me hesitate, they
+grew pathetic.
+
+"Oh-h," she said, reproachfully.
+
+I know I am a fool.  I know that Pasquale would have hurled his
+sarcasms at me.  I know that the whole of her deliciousness was
+mine for the taking--mine for ever and ever.  If I had loved her
+less passionately I would have kissed her young throat lightly
+with a jest.  But to have kissed her thus with such longing as
+mine behind my lips would have been an outrage.
+
+I lifted her to her feet, and rose and turned away, laughing
+unsteadily.
+
+"No, my dear," said I, "that would be--unsuitable."
+
+The bathos of the word made me laugh louder.  Carlotta, aware
+that a joke was in the air, joined in my mirth, and her laughter
+rang fresh.
+
+"What is the suitable way of kissing?"
+
+I took her hand and saluted it in an eighteenth century manner.
+
+"This," said I.
+
+"Oh-h," said Carlotta.  "That is so dull."  She caught up
+Polyphemus and buried her face in his fur.  "That's the way I
+should like to be kissed."
+
+"The man you love, my dear," said I, "will doubtless do it."
+
+She made a little grimace.
+
+"Oh, then, I shall have to wait such a long time."
+
+"You needn't," said I, taking her hands again and speaking very
+seriously.  "Can't you learn to love a man, give him your whole
+heart and all your best and sweetest thoughts?"
+
+"I would marry any nice man if you gave me to him," she answered.
+
+"It would not matter who he was?  Anyone would do?"
+
+"Why, of course," said Carlotta.
+
+"And any one wanting to marry you could kiss you as you kissed
+Polyphemus."
+
+"Oh-h, he would have to be nice--not like Mustapha."
+
+I turned away with a sigh and lit a cigarette, while Carlotta
+curled herself up on the sofa and inspected her face and necklace
+in the silver mirror.  In a moment she was talking to the cat,
+who had jumped on her lap and with arched back was rubbing
+himself against her.
+
+Soon the touch of sadness was lost in the happy sight of her and
+the happy thought that my house was no longer left to me
+desolate.  We laughed away the evening.
+
+But now, sitting alone, I feel empty of soul; like a man stricken
+with fierce hunger who, expecting food in a certain place, finds
+nothing but a few delicate cakes that mock his craving.
+
+
+October 14th.
+
+A week has passed.  I have spent it chiefly in trying to win her
+love.
+
+Is she, after all, only a child, and is this love of mine but a
+monstrous passion?
+
+What is to be done?  Life is beginning to be a torture.  If I
+send her away, I shall eat my heart out.  If she stays, fuel is
+but added to the fire.  Her caressing ways will drive me mad.  To
+repulse her were brutal--she loves to be fondled; she can
+scarcely speak to me without touching me, leaning over me, thus
+filling me with the sense of her.  She treats me with an
+affectionate child's innocence, as if I were sexless.  My
+happiest time with her is spent in public places, restaurants,
+and theatres where her unclouded pleasure is reflected in my
+heart.
+
+I am letting her take music lessons with Herr Stuer, who lives
+close by in the Avenue Road.  Perhaps music may help in her
+development.
+
+
+October 21st.
+
+To please her I am accustoming myself to this out-of-door life,
+which once I despised so cordially.  Pasquale has joined us two
+or three times.  Last night he gave a dinner in Carlotta's honour
+at the Continental.  The ladies of the party have asked her to go
+to see them.  She must have some society, I suppose, and I must
+go with her.  They belong to the half smart set, eager to conceal
+beneath a show of raffishness their plentiful lack of intellect
+and their fundamental bourgeois respectability.  In spite of
+Pasquale's brilliance and Carlotta's rapturous enjoyment I sat
+mumchance and depressed, out of my element.
+
+My work is at a standstill, and Carlotta is my life.  I fear I am
+deteriorating.
+
+On Judith, whom I have seen once or twice since Carlotta's
+return, I called this afternoon.  She is unhappy.  Although I
+have not confessed to my thraldom, her woman's wit, I feel sure,
+has penetrated to the heart of my mystery.  There has been no
+deep emotion in our intercourse.  Its foundation has been real
+friendship sweetened with pleasant sentimentality.  And yet
+jealousy of Carlotta consumes her.  Her _amour propre_ is deeply
+wounded.  She makes me feel as if I had played the part of a
+brute.  But O Judith, my dear, I have only been a man.  "The same
+thing," I fancy I hear her answer.  But no.  I have never loved a
+woman, my dear, in all my life before, and as I made no secret of
+it, I am guiltless of any.  thing like betrayal.  In due season I
+will tell you frankly of the new love; but how can I tell you
+now?  How could I tell any human being?
+
+I imagine myself as Panurge, taking counsel with a Pantagruelian
+friend.  "I am in love with Carlotta and desire to marry her."
+"Then marry her," says Pantagruel.  "But she does not love me."
+"Then don't marry," says Pantagruel.  "But nay," urges poor
+Panurge, "she would marry me according to any rite, civil or
+ecclesiastical, to-morrow." _"Mariez-vous doncques de par dieu,"_
+replies Pantagruel.  "But I should be a villain to take advantage
+of her innocence and submission."  "Then don't marry."  "But I
+can't live without her," says Panurge, desperately.  "I am as a
+man bewitched.  If I don't marry her I shall waste away with
+longing."  "Then marry her in God's name!" says Pantagruel.  And
+I am no wiser by his counsel, and I have paraded the complication
+of my folly before mocking eyes.
+
+
+October 23d.
+
+I perceive that the young man of the idiot metaphor was gifted
+with piercing acumen.  Beneath the Jaquesian melancholy of my
+temperament he diagnosed the potentiality of canine rabidness.
+No rational being is afflicted with this grotesque concentration
+of idea, this fierce hot fury waxing in intensity day by day.
+
+I must consult a brain specialist.
+
+
+October 25th.
+
+I went to Judith this afternoon, more to prove the loyalty of my
+friendship than to seek comfort from her society.  Over tea we
+discussed the weather and books and her statistical work.  It was
+dull, but unembarrassing.  The grey twilight crept into the room
+and there was a pause in our talk.  She broke it by asking,
+without looking at me:
+
+"When are we to have an evening together again?"
+
+"Whenever you like, my dear Judith."
+
+"To-morrow?"
+
+"I am afraid not to-morrow," said I.
+
+"Are you doing anything so very particular?"
+
+"I have arranged to take Carlotta to the Empire."
+
+"Oh," said Judith shortly, and I was left uncomfortable for
+another spell of silence.
+
+"It would be very kind, Marcus, to ask me to accompany you," she
+said at last.
+
+"Carlotta and myself?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"My question arose from the stupidity of surprise," said I.  "I
+thought you disliked Carlotta."
+
+"By no means.  I should be glad to make her further acquaintance.
+Any one that interests you must also be interesting to me."
+
+"In that case," said I, "your coming will give us both the
+greatest possible pleasure."
+
+"I haven't had a merry evening for ever so long."
+
+"We will dine somewhere first and have supper afterwards.  The
+whole gamut of merriment.  Toute la lyre.  And you shall have," I
+added, "some of your favourite Veuve Cliquot."
+
+"It will be charming," said Judith, politely.
+
+In fact, politeness has been the dominant note of her attitude
+to-day, a sober restraint of manner such as she would adopt when
+rather tired towards an ordinary acquaintance.  Has she
+reconciled herself to the inevitable and taken this Empire frolic
+as a graceful method of showing it?  I should like to believe so,
+but the course is scarcely consistent with that motor of illogic
+which she is pleased to call her temperament.  I am puzzled.
+
+Her smile as we parted sent a chill through me, being the smile
+of a mask instead of a woman's face; and it was not the face of
+Judith.  I don't anticipate much merriment tomorrow evening.
+
+
+At Carlotta's suggestion, I have sent a line to Pasquale to ask
+him to join us.  His gay wit will lend to the entertainment a
+specious air of revelry which Carlotta will take as genuine.
+
+I have often thought lately of the hopeless passion of Alfonso
+the Magnanimous of Naples, as set forth by Pope Pius II in his
+Commentaries; for I am beginning to take a morbid interest in the
+unhappy love affairs of other men and to institute comparisons.
+If they have lived through the torment, why should not I?  But
+Alfonso sighed for Lucrezia d'Alagna, a beautiful chaste statue
+of ice who loved him; whereas I crave the warm-blooded thing that
+is mine for the taking, but no more loves me than she loves the
+policeman who salutes her on his beat.  I cannot take her.
+Something stronger than my passion opposes an adamantine barrier.
+I love her with my soul as well as with my body, and my soul
+cries out for the soul that the Almighty forgot when endowing her
+with entity.
+
+This evening a letter from the Editor of The Quarterly Review.
+It would give him great pleasure if I would contribute a
+Renaissance article, taking as my text a German, a Russian, and
+an English attempt to whitewash the Borgia family.  Six months
+ago the compliment would have filled me with gratification.  To-
+day what to me are the whitewashed Borgias or the solemn denizens
+of the Athenaeum reading-room who will slumber over my account of
+the blameless poisonings of this amiable family?  They are vanity
+and vexation of a spirit already sore at ease.
+
+As I write the door creaks.  I look up.  Behold Carlotta in
+hastily slipped on dressing-gown, open in front, her hair
+streaming loose to her waist, her bare feet flashing pink beneath
+her night-dress.
+
+"Oh, Seer Marcous, darling, I am so frightened!"
+
+She ran forward and caught the lappels of my coat as I rose from
+my chair.
+
+"What is the matter?"
+
+"There is a mouse in my bed."
+
+Polyphemus saved the situation by jumping from the sofa and
+rubbing his back against her feet.
+
+"Take the cat and tell him to kill it," said I, "and go back to
+bed at once."
+
+I must have spoken roughly, for she regarded me with her great
+eyes full of innocent reproach.
+
+"There, take up the cat and go," I repeated.  "You mustn't come
+down here looking like that."
+
+"I thought I looked very pretty," said Carlotta, moving a step
+nearer.
+
+I sat down at my writing-table and fixed my eyes on my paper.
+
+"You are like a Houri that has been sent away from Paradise for
+misbehaviour," I said.
+
+She laughed her curious cooing laugh.
+
+"_Hou!_  Seer Marcous is shocked!"  And she ran, away, rubbing
+Polyphemus's nose against her face.
+
+
+I wonder if the Devil, having grown infirm, is mixing up his
+centuries and mistaking me for a mediaeval saint?  Paphnutius for
+instance, who was visited by such a seductress.  What is the
+legend?  To get rid of her he burns off his hand, whereupon she
+falls dead.  He prays and she returns to life and becomes a nun.
+No, Messer Diavolo, I am not Paphnutius.  I will not maim myself,
+nor do I want Carlotta to fall dead; and I cannot pray and effect
+a pietistic resurrection.  I am simply a fool of a modern man
+tempted out of his wits, who scarce knows what it is that he
+speaks or writes.
+
+I am not superstitious, but I feel myself to-night on the brink
+of some disaster.  I walk restlessly about the room.  On the
+mantel-piece are three photographs in silver frames: Judith,
+Carlotta, Pasquale.  That which is of mockery in the spirit of
+each seems to-night to be hovering round the portraits and to be
+making sport of me.  An autumn gale is howling among the trees
+outside, like a legion of lost souls.  Listen.  Messer Diavolo
+himself might be riding by with a whoop of derision.
+
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER XV
+
+
+October 26th.
+
+I knew something would happen.  Messer Diavolo does not ride
+whooping to no purpose by the windows of people whom he desires
+to torment; nor does he inspire photographs for nothing with an
+active spirit of mockery.
+
+We dined at the Trocadero.  Carlotta loves the band and the buzz
+of Babel and the heavy scents and the clatter and the tumult and
+the glare of light; otherwise I should have chosen a discreeter
+hostelry where the footfalls of the waiting-men were noiseless
+and the walls in quiet shadow, where there was nothing but
+the mellow talk of friends to distract the mind from the
+consideration of exquisite flavours.  But in these palaces of
+clashing splendour, the stunned brain fails to receive
+impressions from the glossopharyngeal nerve, and one eats
+unthinkingly like a dog.  But this matters little to Carlotta.
+Perhaps when I was nineteen it mattered little to me.  And
+to-night, also, it mattered little, for my mind was preoccupied
+and a dinner with Lucullus would have been savourless.
+
+If the Psalmist cried, "What is man that Thou art mindful of
+him?" what cry had he at the back of his head to utter concerning
+woman?  Did he leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles
+Darwin in his "Theory of Sexual Selection"?  Or did he in the
+good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of
+the Deity?  If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed
+the very fount of human tears.
+
+When I looked at Judith, I was smitten with a great pain.  She
+had not looked so young, so fresh, so fragilely fair for many
+months.  She wore a dress of corn-flower blue that deepened the
+violet of her eyes.  In the mass of flax hued thistle-down that
+is her hair a blue argus butterfly completed the chord of colour.
+There was the faintest tinge of pink in her cheek applied with
+delicate art.  Her dress seemed made of unsubstantial dream
+stuff--I believe they call it chiffon--and it covered her bosom
+and arms like the spray of a fairy sea.  She had the air of an
+impalpable Undine, a creation of sea-foam and sea-flower; an
+exquisite suggestion of the ethereal which floated beauty, as it
+were, into her face.  I know little of women, save what these
+past few grievous months have taught me; but I know that hours of
+anxious thought and desperate hope lay behind this effect of
+fragile loveliness.  The wit of woman could not have rendered a
+woman's body a greater contrast to that of her rival; and with
+infinite subtlety she had imbued the contrast with the deeper
+significance of rare and spiritual things.  I know this was so.
+I know it was a challenge, a defiance, an ordeal by combat; and
+the knowledge hurt me, so that I felt like a Dathan or Abiram who
+had laid hand on the Ark of the Covenant (for the soul of a
+woman, by heaven! is a holy thing), and I wished that the earth
+could open and swallow me up.
+
+We sat down to table in the middle of the great room--a quiet
+corner on the balcony away from the band is not to Carlotta's
+taste--like any conventional party of four, and at first talked
+of indifferent matters.  Conciergerie dinner-parties in the
+Terror always began with a discussion of the latest cure for
+megrims, or the most fashionable cut of a panier.  Presently
+Pasquale who had been talking travel with Judith appealed to me.
+
+"What year was it, Ordeyne, that I came home from Abyssinia?"
+
+"I forget," said I.  "I only remember you presenting me with that
+hideous thing hanging in my passage, which you called a
+dulcimer."
+
+_"Gage d'amour?"_ smiled Judith.
+
+Pasquale laughed and twirled his swaggering moustache.
+
+"I did get it from a damsel, and that is why I called it a
+dulcimer, but she didn't sing of Mount Abora.  I wish I could
+remember the year."
+
+"I think it was in 1894," said Judith quietly.
+
+Pasquale, who had been completely unaware of Judith's existence
+until half an hour before, could not repress a stare of polite
+surprise.
+
+"I believe you are right.  In fact, you are.  But how can you
+tell?"
+
+"Through the kindness of Sir Marcus," replied Judith graciously,
+"you are a very old acquaintance.  I could write you off-hand a
+nice little obituary notice with all the adventures--well, I will
+not say complete--but with all the dates accurate, I assure you.
+I have a head for that sort of thing."
+
+"Yes," I cried, desiring to turn the conversation.  "Don't tell
+Mrs. Mainwaring anything you wish forgotten.  Facts are her
+passion.  She writes wonderful articles full of figures that make
+your head spin, and publishes them in the popular magazines over
+the signature of Willoughby the statistician.  Allow me to
+present to you a statistical ghost."
+
+But Pasquale's subtle Italian brain was paying but half attention
+to me.  I could read his inferences from Judith's observations,
+and I could tell what she wanted him to infer.  I seem to have
+worn my sensory system outside instead of inside my skin this
+evening.
+
+"Ordeyne," said he, "you are a pig, and the great-grandfather of
+pigs--"
+
+"Foul" cried Carlotta, seizing on an intelligible point of the
+conversation.
+
+"Why didn't you present me to Mrs. Mainwaring in 1894.?  I
+declare I have thought myself allied to that man for twenty years
+in bonds of the most intimate friendship, and he has never so
+much as mentioned you to me."
+
+"Seer Marcous says that Pasquale is a bad lot," remarked
+Carlotta, with an air of sapience, after a sip of orangeade, a
+revolting beverage which she loves to drink at her meals.
+
+Pasquale threw back his handsome head and laughed again like the
+chartered libertine he is, and Judith smiled.
+
+"'Out of the mouths of babes, etc.,"' said I, apologetically.
+
+"In all seriousness," said Pasquale to Judith, "I had no idea
+that any one was such a close friend of Ordeyne's."
+
+Judith turned to me, with a graceful gesture of her shoulders.
+
+"I think we have been close friends, Marcus?"
+
+"Oh, ye-es," broke in Carlotta.  "Mrs. Mainwaring has the picture
+of Seer Marcous in her bedroom, and there is the picture of Mrs.
+Mainwaring in our drawing-room.  You have not seen it?  But yes.
+You have not recognised it, Pasquale?  Mrs. Mainwaring is so
+pretty tonight.  Much prettier than the photograph.  Yes, you are
+so pretty.  I would like to put you on the mantel-piece as an
+ornament instead of the picture."
+
+"May I be allowed to endorse Carlotta's sentiment of
+appreciation?" I said, with a view to covering her indiscretion,
+for I saw a flash of conjecture in Pasquale's eyes and a sudden
+spot of real red in Judith's cheeks.  She had evidently desired
+to suggest an old claim on my regard, but to have it based on
+such intimate details as the enshrining of my photograph was not
+to her fancy.
+
+"I am vastly beholden to you both," said Judith, who has a
+graceful way of receiving compliments.  "But," turning to
+Pasquale, "we have travelled far from Abyssinia."
+
+"To Sir Marcus's mantel-piece.  Suppose we stay there."
+
+"There is you and me and Mrs. Mainwaring," said the literal
+Carlotta, "and I am the big one in the middle.  It was made big--
+big," she added, extending her arms in her exaggerating way.  "I
+was wearing this dress."
+
+"Mr. Pasquale and I will have to enlarge our frames, Marcus,"
+said Judith, "or we shall be jealous.  We shall have to make
+common cause together."
+
+"We will declare an inoffensive alliance," laughed Pasquale.
+
+"Offensive if you like," said Judith.
+
+It may have been some effect of the glitter of lights, but I vow
+I saw a swift interchange of glances.  Pasquale immediately
+turned to Carlotta with a jesting remark, and Judith engaged me
+in conversation on our old days in Rome.  Suddenly she swerved
+from the topic, and leaning forward, indicated our companions
+with an imperceptible motion of her head.
+
+"Don't you think," she said in a low voice, "they are a
+well-matched pair?  Both young and picturesque; it would solve
+many things."
+
+I glanced round.  Carlotta, elbow on the table and chin in hand,
+was looking deep into Pasquale's eyes, just as she has looked
+into mine.  Her lips had the half-sensuous, half-childish pout
+provocative of kisses.
+
+"Do, and I will love you," I heard her say.
+
+Oh, those dove-notes, those melting eyes, those lips!  Oh, the
+horrible fool passion that burns out my soul and brain and
+reduces me to rave like a lovelorn early Victorian tailor!  Which
+was worse I know not--the spasm of jealousy or the spasm of
+self-contempt that followed it.  At that moment the music ceased
+suddenly on a loud crashing chord.
+
+The moment seemed to be magnetic to all but Carlotta, who was
+enjoying herself prodigiously.  Our three personalities appeared
+to vibrate rudely one against the other.  I was conscious that
+Judith read me, that Pasquale read Judith, that again something
+telegraphic passed between them.  The waiter offered me
+partridge.  Pasquale quickly turned from Carlotta to his
+left-hand neighbour.
+
+"I think we ought to drink Faust's health, don't you?"
+
+I started.  Had I not myself traced the analogy?
+
+"Faust?" queried Judith at a loss.
+
+"Our friend Faust opposite me," said Pasquale, raising his
+champagne glass.  "Hasn't he been transformed from the lean and
+elderly bookworm into the gay, young gallant about the town?
+Once one could scarcely drag him from his cell to the quietest of
+dinners, and now--has he told you of his dissipations this past
+month, Mrs. Mainwaring
+
+Judith smiled.  "Have you been Mephistopheles?"
+
+"What is Mephistopheles?" asked Carlotta.
+
+"The devil," said Pasquale, "who made Sir Marcus young again."
+
+"Oh, that's me," cried Carlotta, clapping her hands.  "He does not
+read in big books any longer.  Oh, I was so frightened when I
+first came."  (I must say she hid her terrors pretty
+effectually.)  "He was so wise, and always reading and writing,
+and I thought he was fifty.  And now he is not wise at all, and
+he said two, three days ago I had made him twenty-five."
+
+"If you go on at the rate you have begun, my dear," Judith
+remarked in her most charming manner, "in another year you will
+have brought him down to long clothes and a feeding-bottle."
+
+Carlotta thought this very funny and laughed joyously.  I laughed
+too, out of courtesy, at Judith's bitter sarcasm, and turned the
+conversation, but Pasquale was not to be baulked of his toast.
+
+"Here's to our dear friend Faust; may he grow younger and younger
+every day."
+
+We clinked glasses.  Judith sighed when the performance was
+concluded.
+
+"That is one of the many advantages of being a man.  If you do
+sell your soul to the devil you can see that you get proper
+payment.  A woman is paid in promissory notes, which are
+dishonoured when they fall due."
+
+I contested the proposition.  The irony of this peculiarly
+painful revel lay in the air of gaiety it seemed necessary to
+maintain.  A miserable business is civilisation!
+
+"Did you ever hear of a woman getting youth out of such a
+bargain?" she retorted with some vehemence.
+
+"As women systematically underpay cabmen," said I, "so do they
+try to underpay the devil; and he is one too many for them."
+
+"I am afraid," said Pasquale, "that the old days of shrewd
+bargains are over.  There is a glut in the soul-market and they
+only fetch the price of old bones."
+
+"He is talking foolish things that I do not understand," said
+Carlotta, putting her hand on my arm.
+
+"It is called sham cynicism, my dear," said I, "and we all ought
+to be ashamed of ourselves."
+
+"What do you like best to talk about?" Judith asked sweetly.
+
+"Myself.  And so does everybody," replied Carlotta.
+
+We laughed, and for a time talk ceased to be allusive.  But
+later, over our coffee, while the band was playing loudly some
+new American march, and Carlotta and Pasquale were laughing
+together, Judith drew near me.
+
+"You did not answer my question about those two, Marcus."
+
+My fingers trembled as I lit a fresh cigarette.
+
+"He is not a man to whom any woman's destiny should be
+entrusted."
+
+"And is she a woman on whom a man should stake his life's
+happiness?"
+
+"God knows," said I, setting my teeth.
+
+It was not an enjoyable dinner-party.  I longed for the evening
+to be over, to have Carlotta safe back with me at home.  I felt a
+curious dread of the Empire.
+
+We arrived there towards the end of the first ballet.  Carlotta,
+as soon as she had taken her seat, leaned both elbows on the
+front of the box and surrendered her senses to the stage.
+Pasquale talked to Judith.  Wishing for a few moments alone I
+left the box and sauntered moodily along the promenade behind the
+First Circle.  The occupants were either leaning over the
+partitions and watching the spectacle or sitting with drink
+before them at the little marble tables at the back.  The gaudy,
+gilded, tobacco-smoke and humanity-filled theatre seemed to be
+unreal, the stage but a phantom cloud effect.  I wondered why I,
+a creature from the concrete world, was there.  I had an insane
+impulse to fly from it all, to go out into the streets, and
+wander, wander for ever, away from the world.  I was walking
+along the promenade, lost in this lunacy, when I stumbled against
+a fellow-promenader and the shock brought me to my senses.  It
+was an elderly, obese Oriental wearing a red fez.  He had a long
+nose and small, crafty eyes, and was deeply pitted with smallpox.
+I made profuse apologies and he accepted them with suavity.  It
+then occurring to me that I was be having in a discourteous and
+abjectly absurd manner, I made my way back to the box.  I drew a
+chair to Judith's side.
+
+"You are giving me a captivating evening," she said, with a
+smile.
+
+"Whom are you captivating?" I asked, idly jesting.  "Pasquale?"
+
+"You are cruel," whispered Judith, with a flicker of her eyelids.
+
+I flushed, ashamed, not having weighed the significance of my
+words.  All I could say was: "I beg your pardon," whereat Judith
+laughed mirthlessly.  I relapsed into silence.  Turn followed
+turn on the stage.  While the curtain was lowered Carlotta sank
+back with a little sigh of enjoyment, and nodded brightly at me.
+
+"Do you remember," she said, turning to me, at a fresh fall of
+the curtain, "when you brought me first?  I said I should like to
+live here.  Wasn't I silly?"
+
+She turned again, then suddenly rose to her feet and staggered
+back to the back of the box, pointing outward, with an expression
+of wild terror on her face.
+
+"Hamdi--he's down there--he saw me."
+
+I sprang to her assistance and put my arm around her.
+
+"Nonsense, dear," said I.
+
+But Pasquale, looking around the house, cried:
+
+"By Jove!  she's right.  I would recognise the old villain a
+thousand years hence in Tartarus.  There he is."
+
+I left Carlotta, and the first person my eyes rested upon in the
+stalls was my obese but suave Oriental, regarding the box with an
+impassive countenance.
+
+"That's Hamdi Effendi, all right," said Pasquale.
+
+Carlotta clutched my arms as I joined her at the back of the box.
+
+"Oh, take me away, Seer Marcous, take me away," she moaned
+piteously.  My poor child was white and shaken with fear.  I
+again put my arm round her.
+
+"No harm can happen to you, dear," I said, soothingly.
+
+"Oh, darling Seer Marcous, take me home," cried Carlotta.
+
+"Very well," said I.  I helped her on with her wrap, and
+apologising to the two others, begged them to remain.
+
+"We'll all go together," said Judith quietly.
+
+"And form a body-guard," laughed Pasquale.
+
+Carlotta clinging to my arm we left the box and slipped through
+the promenade and down the stairs.
+
+Hamdi Effendi, having anticipated our intention, cut off our
+retreat in the vestibule.  Carlotta shrank nearer to me.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Monsieur, but may I have the pleasure of a
+few words with you about this young lady?" said he in the
+urbanest manner and the most execrable French.
+
+"I hardly see the necessity," said I.
+
+"Pardon me, but this young lady is a Turkish subject and my
+daughter.  My name is Hamdi Effendi, Prefect of Police at Aleppo,
+and my address in London is the Hotel Metropole."
+
+"I am charmed to make your acquaintance," said I.  "I have often
+heard of you from Mademoiselle--but I believe both her father and
+mother were English, so she is neither your daughter nor a
+Turkish subject."
+
+"Ah, that we will see," rejoined the polite Oriental.  He
+addressed some words rapidly in Turkish to Carlotta, who
+shudderingly replied in the same language.
+
+"Mademoiselle unfortunately does not consent to accompany me," he
+interpreted with a smile.  "So I am afraid I will have to take
+her back without her consent."
+
+"If you do, Hamdi Effendi," said Pasquale in a light tone of
+conversation, but with the ugliest snarl of the lips that I have
+ever beheld, "I shall most certainly kill you."
+
+Hamdi turned to him with a polite bow.
+
+"Ah, it is Monsieur Pasquale.  I thought I recognised you."
+
+"You have every reason to do so," said Pasquale.
+
+"I saved you from prison."
+
+"You accepted a bribe."
+
+"For heaven's sake," cried Judith, "go on speaking in low voices,
+or we shall have a scene here."
+
+One or two idlers hung near with an air of curiosity and the huge
+beuniformed commissionaire watched us with an uncertain eye.  I
+kept a tight hold of Carlotta and drew her more behind the screen
+of a palm near which we happened to stand.
+
+"Madame is right," said Hamdi.  "We can discuss this little
+affair like gentlemen."
+
+"Then, in the most gentlemanly way in the world," said Pasquale,
+"I swear to you that if you touch this young lady, I will kill
+you."
+
+"It appears, to be Monsieur," said the obese Turk with a graceful
+wave of the hand in my direction, "and not you, who has robbed my
+home of its treasure, unless," he added, and I shall always
+remember the hideous leer of that pulpy-nosed and small-pox
+pitted face, "unless Monsieur has relieved you of your
+responsibilities."
+
+For a moment I was speechless.  Pasquale put himself in front of
+me.
+
+"Steady on, Ordeyne."
+
+"Sir," said I, "I found this young lady destitute in the streets
+of London.  She is my wife and therefore a British subject; so
+you can take yourself and your infamous insinuations to the
+devil, and the quicker the better."
+
+"Or there'll be two of us engaged in the killing," said Pasquale.
+
+Hamdi again exchanged a few sentences in Turkish with Carlotta,
+and then smiled upon us with the same unruffeled suavity.
+
+_"Au revoir, Mesdames et Messieurs."_  With a courteous salute he
+shuffled back towards the stall-entrance.
+
+The tension over, Carlotta broke from me and clutched Pasquale by
+the arm.
+
+"Oh, kill him, kill him, kill him!" she cried in a passionate
+whisper.
+
+He freed himself gently and took out a cigarette case.
+
+"Scarcely necessary.  He'll soon die."  And turning to me he
+added: "Not a sound organ in his body.  Besides, it seems to me
+that if there is any murdering to be done, it's the business of
+Sir Marcus."
+
+"There is going to be no murdering," said I, profoundly
+disgusted, "and don't talk in that revolting way about the
+wretched man dying."
+
+I regained possession of Carlotta who, seeing that I was angry,
+cast a scared glance at me, and became docile as suddenly as she
+had grown passionate.  I turned to Judith.
+
+"Will you ever forgive me--" I began.
+
+But the sight of her face froze me.  It was white and hard and
+haggard, and the lips were drawn into a thin line, and the
+delicate colour she had put upon her cheeks stood out in ghastly
+contrast.  Her dress, like the foam of a summer sea, mocked the
+winter in her face.
+
+"There is nothing to forgive," she said, smiling icily.  "I came
+for a variety entertainment and I have not been disappointed.
+Good-bye.  Perhaps Mr. Pasquale will be so kind as to put me into
+a cab."
+
+"I will drive you home, if you will allow me," said Pasquale.
+
+We separated, shaking hands as if nothing had happened, as
+perfunctorily as if we had been the most distant of
+acquaintances.
+
+On our way back we spoke very little.  Carlotta nestled close
+against me, seeking the shelter of my arm.  She cried, I don't
+know why, but it seemed to afford comfort.  I kissed her lips and
+her hair.
+
+At home, I drew the sofa near the fire--it has been a raw night
+and she feels the cold like a tropical plant--and sat down by her
+side.
+
+"Did you hear what I said to Hamdi Effendi--that you were my
+wife?"
+
+"But that was only a lie," she answered in her plain idiom.
+
+My petting and soothing together with the sense of home security
+and a cup of French chocolate prepared by Antoinette, who,
+astonished at our early return and seeing her darling in
+distress, had hastened to provide culinary consolation, had
+restored her wonted serenity of demeanour.  Polyphemus also
+purred reassuringly upon her lap.
+
+"It was a lie this evening," said I, "but in a few days I hope it
+will be true."
+
+"You are going to marry me?" she asked, suddenly sitting erect
+and looking at me rather bewildered.
+
+"If you will have me, Carlotta."
+
+"I will do what Seer Marcous tells me," she answered.  "Will you
+marry me to-morrow?"
+
+"I think it hardly possible, my dear," I answered.  "But I shall
+lose no time, I assure you.  Once you are my wife neither Hamdi
+Effendi nor the Sultan of Turkey can claim you.  No one can take
+an Englishman's wife away from him."
+
+"Hamdi is a devil," said Carlotta.
+
+"We can laugh at him," said I.
+
+"Did you ever see such an ugly mug?"
+
+Where she gets her occasional bits of slang from I do not know;
+but her little foreign staccato pronunciation gives them unusual
+quaintness.  I laughed, and Carlotta, throwing Polyphemus off her
+lap, laughed too, and sidled up against me.  The cat regarded us
+for a moment with a disgusted eye, then stretched himself as if
+he had quitted Carlotta of his own accord, and walked away in a
+state of dignified boredom.
+
+"Hamdi is like a pig and an elephant and a great fat turkey,"
+said Carlotta.
+
+"If all the world were beautiful," I exclaimed, "such a thing as
+our appreciation of beauty would not exist.  I should not even be
+aware that my Carlotta was beautiful."
+
+She put her hands on my knees in her impulsive way, and bending
+forward looked at me delightedly.
+
+"Oh, you do think so?"
+
+"You are the loveliest and most intoxicating creature on the
+earth, Carlotta."
+
+"Now I am sure, sure, sure," she cried, enraptured.  "You have
+never said it before, Seer Marcous darling, and I must kiss you."
+
+I checked her with my hands on her soft shoulders.
+
+"Only if you promise to marry me."
+
+"Of course," said Carlotta.
+
+She said it as thoughtlessly and light-heartedly as if I had
+asked her to come out for a walk.  Again I felt the odd spasm of
+pain.  In my late madness I had often pictured the scene: how I
+should hold her throbbing beauty in my arms, my senses clouded
+with the fragrance of her, and how, in burning words, I should
+pour out the litany of my passion.  But to the gods it seemed
+otherwise.  No Quaker maiden's betrothal kiss was chaster.  Cold
+grew the fever in my veins and the litany died on my lips.
+
+
+Who and what is she whom I love?  There have been days when her
+eyes have carried in their depths the allurements of a sorceress,
+when her limbs have woven Venusberg enchantments which it has
+taken all my strength to withstand.  But tonight, when I take the
+greatest step and claim her as mine till our lives' end, she
+yields with the complaisance of an ignorant child and raises up
+between us the barrier of her innocence.  When shall I learn the
+soul of her?
+
+Well, _jacta est alea_.  The events of to-night have precipitated
+our destiny.  In all probability Hamdi is powerless to take her
+from my protection, and this marriage is unnecessary as a
+safeguard.  I have no notion of the international law on such
+points--but at any rate it will make the assurance of her safety
+absolute.  No power on earth can take her from me.  Great Heaven!
+The thought of her gone forever out of my life brings the cold
+sweat to my forehead.  Without her, child, enchantress,
+changeling that she is, how could I face existence?
+
+I shall have my heart's desire.  Why, I should be athrill with
+the joy and the flame of youth!  I should laugh and sing!  I
+should perform the happy antics of love's exuberance!  I should
+be transported to the realms where the fairy tales end!
+
+Instead, I sit before a dying fire, as I sat last night, and am
+oppressed with the sense of tragedy.  It was not altogether
+Carlotta's innocence that formed the barrier between us.  That
+which rendered it impassable was Judith's white face.
+
+Judith's white face will haunt my dreams to-night.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+October 27th
+
+I do not like living.  It is thoroughly disagreeable.  Today
+Judith taunted me with never having lived, and I admitted the
+justice of the taunt and regretted in poignant misery the change
+from my old conditions.  If to live is to have one's reason cast
+down and trampled under foot, one's heart aflame with a besotted
+passion and one's soul racked with remorse, then am I living in
+good sooth--and I would far rather be dead and suffering the
+milder pains of Purgatory.  Men differently constituted get used
+to it, as the eels to skinning.  They say _"mea culpa,"_ "damn,"
+or _"Kismet,"_ according to their various traditions, and go
+forth comforted to their workaday pursuits.  I envy them.  I
+enter this exquisite Torture Chamber, and I shriek at the first
+twinge of the thumbscrew and faint at the preliminary embraces of
+the scavenger's daughter.
+
+I envy a fellow like Caesar Borgia.  He could murder a friend,
+seduce his widow, and rob the orphans all on a summer's day, and
+go home contentedly to supper; and after a little music he could
+sleep like a man who has thoroughly earned his repose.  What
+manner of creatures are other men?  They area blank mystery to
+me; and I am writing--or have been writing--a sociological study
+of the most subtle generation of them that has ever existed!  I
+am an empty fool.  I know absolutely nothing.  I can no more
+account for the peaceful slumbers of that marvellous young man of
+five-and-twenty than I can predicate the priority of the first
+hen or the first egg.  I, with never a murder or a seduction or a
+robbery on my conscience, could not sleep last night.  I doubt
+whether I shall sleep to-night.  I feel as if I shall remain
+awake through the centuries with a rat gnawing my vitals.
+
+
+So unhappy looking a woman as Judith, when I called on her early
+this forenoon, I have never beheld.  Gone was the elaborate
+coquetry of yesterday; gone the quiet roguishness of yesteryear;
+gone was all the Judith that I knew, and in her place stood a
+hollow-eyed woman shaking at gates eternally barred.
+
+"I--thought you would come this morning.  I had that lingering
+faith in you."
+
+"Your face haunted me all night," I said.  "I was bound to come."
+
+"So, this is the end of it all," she remarked, stonily.
+
+"No," said I.  "It only marks the transition from a very
+ill-defined relationship to as loyal a friendship as ever man
+could offer woman."
+
+She gave a quivering little shrug of disgust and turned away.
+
+"Oh, don't talk like that 'I can't offer you bread, but I'll give
+you a nice round polished stone.'  Friendship!  What has a woman
+like me got to do with friendship?"
+
+"Have I ever given you much more?"
+
+"God knows what you have given me," she cried, bitterly.  She
+stared out of the window at the sodden street and murky air.  I
+went to her side and touched her wrist.
+
+"For heaven's sake, Judith, tell me what I can do."
+
+"What's done is done," she said, between her teeth.  "When did
+you marry her?"
+
+I explained briefly the condition of affairs.  She looked at me
+hard and long; then stared out of the window again, and scarce
+heeded what I said.
+
+"It was to set myself right with you on this point," I added,
+"that I have visited you at such an hour."
+
+She remained silent.  I took a few turns about the familiar room
+that was filled with the associations of many years.  The piano
+we chose together.  The copy of the Botticelli Tondo--the crowned
+Madonna of the Uffizi--I gave her in Florence.  We had ransacked
+London together to find the Chippendale bookcase; and on its
+shelves stood books that had formed a bond between us, and copies
+of old reviews containing my fugitive contributions.  A spurious
+Japanese dragon in fa‹ence, an inartistic monstrosity dear to her
+heart, at which I had often railed, grinned forgivingly at me
+from the mantel-piece.  I have never realised how closely bound
+up with my habits was this drawing-room of Judith's.  I stopped
+once more by her side.
+
+"I can't leave you altogether, dear," I said, gently.  "A bit of
+myself is in this room."
+
+Her bosom shook with unhappy laughter.
+
+"A bit?"  Then she turned suddenly on me.  "Are you simply dull
+or sheerly cruel?"
+
+"I am dull," said I.  "Why do you refuse my friendship?  Our
+relation has been scarcely more.  It has not touched the deep
+things in us.  We agreed at the start that it should not.  The
+words 'I love you' have never passed between us.  We have been
+loyal to our compact.  Now that love has come into my life--and
+Heaven knows I have striven against it--what would you have me
+do?"
+
+"And what would you have me do?" said Judith, tonelessly.
+
+"Forgive me for breaking off the old, and trust me to make the
+new pleasant to you."
+
+She made no answer, but stood still staring out of the window
+like a woman of stone.  Presently she shivered and crossed to the
+fire, before which she crouched on a low chair.  I remained by
+the window, anxious, puzzled, oppressod.
+
+"Marcus," she said at last, in a low voice.  I obeyed her
+summons.  She motioned me to a chair, and without looking at me
+began to speak.
+
+"You said there was a bit of you in this room.  There is
+everything of you.  Your whole being is for me in this room.  You
+are with me wherever I go.  You are the beginning and end of life
+to me.  I love you with a passion that is killing me.  I am an
+emotional woman.  I made shipwreck of myself because I thought I
+loved a man.  But, as God hears me, you are the only man I have
+loved.  You came to me like a breath of Heaven while I was in
+Purgatory--and you have been Heaven to me ever since.  It has
+been play to you--but to me--"
+
+I fell on my knees beside her.  Each of the low half-whispered
+words was a red hot iron.  I had received last night the message
+of her white face with incredulity.  I had reviewed our past life
+together and had found little warrant in it for that message.  It
+could not come from the depths.  It was staggeringly impossible.
+And now the impossible was the flaming fact.
+
+I fell on my knees beside her.
+
+"Not play, Judith--"
+
+She put out her hand to check me, and the words died on my lips.
+What could I say?
+
+"For you it was a detached pleasant sentiment, if you like; for
+me the deadliest earnest.  I was a fool too.  You never said you
+loved me, but I thought you did.  You were not as other men, you
+knew nothing of the ways of the world or of women or of passion
+--you were reserved, intellectual--you viewed things in a queer
+light of your own.  I felt that the touch of a chain would fret
+you.  I gave you
+absolute freedom--often when I craved for you.  I made no
+demands.  I assented to your philosophic analysis of the
+situation--it is your way to moralise whimsically on everything,
+as if you were a disconnected intelligence outside the universe
+--and I paid no attention to it.  I used to laugh at you--oh, not
+unkindly, but lovingly, happily, victoriously.  Oh, yes, I was a
+fool--what woman in love isn't?  I thought I gave you all you
+needed.  I was content, secure.  I magnified every little
+demonstration.  When you touched my ear it was more to me than
+the embrace of another man might have been.  I have lived on one
+kiss of yours for a week.  To you the kiss was of no more value
+than a cigarette.  I wish," she added in a whisper, "I wish I
+were dead!"
+
+She had spoken in a low, monotonous voice, staring haggardly at
+the fire, while I knelt by her side.  I murmured some banal
+apologia, miserably aware that one set of words is as futile as
+another when one has broken a woman's heart.
+
+"You never knew I loved you?" she went on in the same bitter
+undertone.  "What kind of woman did you take me for?  I have
+accepted help from you to enable me to live in this flat--do you
+imagine I could have done such a thing without loving you?  I
+should have thought it was obvious in a thousand ways."
+
+The fire getting low, she took up the scoop for coals.
+Mechanically I relieved her of the thing and fulfilled the
+familiar task.  Neither spoke for a long time.  She remained
+there and I went to the window.  It had begun to rain.  A
+barrel-organ below was playing some horrible music-hall air, and
+every vibrant note was like a hammer on one's nerves.  The
+grinder's bedraggled Italian wife perceiving me at the window
+grinned up at me with the national curve of the palm.  She had a
+black eye which the cacophonous fiend had probably given her, and
+she grinned like a happy child of nature.  Men in my position do
+not blacken women's eyes; but it is only a question of manners.
+Was I, for that, less of a brute male than the scowling beast at
+the organ?
+
+The sudden sound of a sob made me turn to Judith, who had broken
+down and was crying bitterly, her face hidden in her hands.  I
+bent and touched her shoulder.
+
+"Judith--"
+
+She flung her arms around my neck.
+
+"I can't give you up, I can't, I can't, I can't," she cried,
+wildly.
+
+For the first time in my life I heard a woman give abandoned,
+incoherent utterance to an agony of passion; and it sounded
+horrible, like the cry of an animal wounded to death.
+
+A guilt-stricken creature, scarce daring to meet her eyes, I bade
+her farewell.  She had recovered her composure.
+
+"Make me one little promise, Marcus, do me one little favour,"
+she said, with quivering lip, and letting her cold hand remain in
+mine.  "Stay away from her to-day.  I couldn't bear to think of
+you and her together, happy, love-making, after what I've said
+this morning.  I should writhe with the shame and the torture of
+it.  Give me your thoughts to-day.  Wear a little mourning for
+the dead.  It is all I ask of you."
+
+"I should have done what you ask without the asking," I replied.
+
+I kissed her hand, and went out into the street.
+
+I had walked but a few blind steps when I became aware of the
+presence and voice of Pasquale.
+
+"Coming from Mrs. Mainwaring's?  I am just on my way there to
+restore her opera-glasses which I ran away with last night.
+What's her number?  I forget.  I dropped in at Lingfield Terrace
+to inquire, but found you had already started."
+
+"Seventeen," I answered, mechanically.
+
+"You are not looking well, my good friend," said he.  "I hope
+last night has not upset you.  It's all bluff, you know, on the
+part of the precious Hamdi."
+
+"I dare say it was," I assented.
+
+"And bluff on your part, too.  I have never given your
+imaginative faculties sufficient credit.  It bowled Hamdi out
+clean."
+
+"Yes," said I.  "It bowled him out clean."
+
+"Serve him right," said Pasquale.  "He's the wickedest old thief
+unhung."
+
+"Quite so," said I, "the wickedest old thief unhung."
+
+Pasquale shook me by the arm.
+
+"Are you a man or a phonograph?  What on earth has happened to
+you?"
+
+I think I envied the laughter in his handsome, dark face, and the
+careless grace of the fellow as he stood beneath the dripping
+umbrella debonair as a young prince, in perfectly fitting blue
+serge-he wore no overcoat; mine was buttoned up to the chinand
+immaculate suede gloves.
+
+"What is it?" he repeated, gaily.
+
+"I didn't sleep last night," said I, "my breakfast disagreed with
+me, and it's raining in the most unpleasant manner."
+
+Even while I was speaking he left my side and darted across the
+road.  In some astonishment I watched him for a moment from the
+kerb, and then made my way slowly to the other side.  I found him
+in conversation with an emaciated, bedraggled woman standing by
+an enormous bundle, about three times her own cubic bulk, which
+she had rested on the slimy pavement.  One hand pressed a panting
+bosom.
+
+"You are going to carry that in your arms all the way to South
+Kensington?" I heard him cry as I approached.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the woman.
+
+"Then you shan't.  I'm not going to allow it.  Catch hold of
+this."
+
+The umbrella which he thrust out at her she clutched
+automatically, to prevent it falling about her ears.  The veto
+she received with a wonderment which deepened into stupefaction
+when she saw him lift the huge bundle in his arms and stalk away
+with it down the street.  She turned a scared face at me.
+
+"It's washing," she said.
+
+Pasquale paused, looked round and motioned her onward.  She
+followed without a word, holding the trim silver mounted
+umbrella, and I mechanically brought up the rear.  It had all
+happened so quickly that I too was confused.  The scanty populace
+in the rain-filled street stared and gaped.  A shambling fellow
+in corduroys bawled an obscene jest.  Pasquale put down his
+bundle.
+
+"Do you want to be sent to hell by lightning?" he asked, with the
+evil snarl of the lips.
+
+"No," said the man, sheering off.
+
+"I'm glad," remarked Pasquale, picking up the bundle.  And we
+resumed our progress.
+
+Luckily a four-wheeled cab overtook us.  Pasquale stopped it,
+squeezed the bundle inside, and held the door open for the
+faltering and bewildered woman, as if she had been the authentic
+duchessa at Ealing.
+
+"You were saying, Ordeyne," he observed, as the cabman drove off
+with three shillings and his incoherent fare, "you were saying
+that your breakfast disagreed with you."
+
+
+In spite of my heaviness of heart, I laughed and loved the man.
+There was something fantastically chivalrous in the action;
+something superb in the contempt of convention; something
+whimsical, adventurous, unexpected; and something divine in the
+wrathful pity; and something irresistible in his impudent
+apostrophe to myself.  It has been the one flash of comfort
+during this long and desolate day.
+
+
+I have kept my promise to Judith.  I have lunched and dined at
+the club, and in the library of the club I have tried to while
+away the hours.  I intended this morning to make the necessary
+arrangements for the marriage.  After my interview with Judith I
+had not the heart.  I put it off till to-morrow.  I have observed
+the day as a day of mourning.  I have worn sackcloth and ashes.
+I have done such penance as I could for the grievous fault I have
+committed.  Carlotta is in bed and asleep.  She went early, says
+Antoinette, having a bad headache.  No wonder, poor child.
+
+A few moments ago I was tempted to peep into her room and satisfy
+myself that she was not ailing.  A headache is the common
+precursor to many maladies.  But I remembered my promise and
+refrained.  The cooing notes of the voice would have called me to
+her side, and her arms would have been around my neck and I
+should have forgotten Judith.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+October 28th.
+
+I rose late this morning.  When I went down to breakfast I found
+that Carlotta had already gone for her music lesson.
+
+I drove at once to the Temple to see my lawyers and to make
+arrangements for a marriage by special license.
+
+I returned at one o'clock.  Stenson met me in the hall.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Sir Marcus, but Mademoiselle hasn't come back
+yet."
+
+I waited an uneasy hour.  Such a lengthy absence from home was
+unprecedented.  At two o'clock I went round to Herr Stuer in the
+Avenue Road--a five minutes' walk.
+
+He entered the sitting-room into which I had been ushered, wiping
+his lips.
+
+"I am sorry to disturb you, Herr Stuer," said I, "but will you
+kindly tell me when Miss Carlotta left you, this morning?"
+
+"Miss Carlotta came not at all this morning," he replied.
+
+"But it was her regular day?"
+
+"At ten o'clock.  She did not come.  At eleven I have another
+pupil.  She has not before missed one lesson."
+
+I flew back home, in an agony of hope that her laughing face
+would meet me there and dispel a dread that chilled me like an
+icy wind.
+
+There was no Carlotta.
+
+There has been no Carlotta all this awful day.
+
+There will never be a Carlotta again.
+
+I drove to the police station.
+
+"What do you think has happened?" asked the Inspector.
+
+It was only too horribly obvious.  Any man but myself would have
+kept her under lock and key and established a guard round the
+house.  Any man but myself would have never let her out of his
+sight until he had married her, until he had tracked Hamdi and
+his myrmidons back to Alexandretta.
+
+"Abduction has happened," I cried wildly.  "Between Lingfield
+Terrace and Avenue Road she has been caught, thrust into a closed
+carriage, gagged and carried God knows where by the wiliest old
+thief in Asia.  He is the Prefect of Police in Aleppo.  His name
+is Hamdi Effendi and he is staying at the Hotel Metropole."
+
+The Inspector questioned me.  Heaven knows how I answered.  I saw
+the scene.  The waiting carriage.  The unfrequented bit of road.
+My heart's darling, her face a radiant flower in the grey
+morning, tripping lightheartedly along.  The sudden dash, the
+struggle, the swiftly closed door.  It was a matter of a few
+seconds.  My brain grew dizzy with the vision.
+
+"You say that he threatened to abduct her?" asked the Inspector.
+
+"Yes," said I, "and a friend of mine promised to kill him.
+Heaven grant he keep his promise!"
+
+"Be careful, Sir Marcus," smiled the Inspector.  "Or if there is
+a murder committed you will be an accessory before the fact."
+
+I intimated my disregard of the contingency.  What did it matter?
+Nothing in the world mattered save the recovery of the light and
+meaning of my existence.  My friend's name?  Sebastian Pasquale,
+He lived near by in the St. John's Wood Road.
+
+"The best thing you can do, Sir Marcus," said the Inspector, "is
+to get hold of Mr. Pasquale and take him with you to Scotland
+Yard.  Perhaps two heads will be better than one.  In the
+meanwhile we shall communicate with headquarters and make the
+necessary inquiries in the neighbourhood."
+
+I drove to St. John's Wood Road, and learned to my dismay that
+Pasquale had given up his rooms there a week ago.  All his
+letters were addressed to his club in Piccadilly.  I drove
+thither.  How has mankind contented itself for these thousands of
+years with a horse as its chief means of locomotion?  Oh, the
+exasperation I suffered behind that magnified snail!  I dashed
+into the club.  Mr. Pasquale had not been there all day.  No, he
+was not staying there.  It was against the rules to give members'
+private addresses.
+
+"But it's a matter of life and death!" I cried.
+
+"To tell you the truth, sir," said the hall porter, "Mr.
+Pasquale's only permanent address is his banker's, and we really
+don't know where he is staying at present."
+
+I wrote a hurried line:
+
+"Hamdi has abducted Carlotta.  I am half crazed.  As you love me
+give me your help.  Oh, God! man, why aren't you here?"
+
+I left it with the porter, and crawled to Scotland Yard.  The
+cabman at my invectives against his sauntering beast waxed
+indignant; it was a three-quarter blood mare and one of the
+fastest trotters in London.
+
+"She passes everything," said he.
+
+"It is because everything is standing still or going backward or
+turned upside down," said I.
+
+No doubt he thought me mad.  Mad as a dingo dog.  The thought of
+the words, the summer and the sun sent a spasm of hunger through
+my heart.  Then I murmured to myself: "'Save my soul from hell
+and my darling from the power of the dog.' Which dog?  Not the
+dingo dog."
+I verily believe my brain worked wrong to-day.
+
+Great Scotland Yard at last.  I went through passages.  I found
+myself in a nondescript room where a courteous official seated at
+a desk held me on the rack for half an hour.  I had to describe
+Carlotta: not in the imagery wherein only one could create an
+impression of her sweetness, but in the objective terms of the
+police report.  What was she wearing?  A hat, and jacket, a
+skirt, shoes ; of course she wore gloves; possibly she carried a
+muff.  Impatient of such commonplace details, I described her
+fully.  But the glory of her bronze hair, her great dark brown
+eyes, the quivering sensitiveness of her lips; her intoxicating
+compound of Botticelli and the Venusberg; the dove-notes of her
+voice; all was a matter of boredom to Scotland Yard.  They
+clamoured for the colour of her feathers and the material of
+which her dress was made; her height in vulgar figures and the
+sizes of her gloves and shoes .
+
+"How on earth can I tell you?" I cried in desperation.
+
+"Perhaps one of your servants can give the necessary
+information," replied the urbane official.  If I had lost an
+umbrella he could not have viewed my plight with more inhuman
+blandness!
+
+A miracle happened.  As I was writing a summons to Stenson to
+obtain these details from Antoinette and attend at once, a
+policeman entered and I learned that my confidential man was at
+the door.  My heart leapt within me.  He had tracked me hither
+and had come to tell me that Carlotta was safe.  But the first
+glance at his face killed the wild hope.  He had tracked me
+hither, it is true; but only apologetically to offer what
+information might be useful.
+"It is a very great liberty, Sir Marcus, and I will retire at
+once if I have overstepped my duties, but there are important
+details, sir, in catastrophes of this nature with which my
+experience has taught me only servants can be acquainted."
+
+There must be a book of ten thousand pages entitled "The Perfect
+Valet," dealing with every contingency of domestic life which
+this admirable fellow has by heart.  He uttered his Ciceronian
+sentence with the gravity of a pasteboard figure in the toy
+theatre of one's childhood.
+
+"Can you describe the young lady's dress?" asked the official.
+
+"I have made it my business," said Stenson, "to obtain accurate
+information as to every detail of Mademoiselle Carlotta's attire
+when she left the house this morning."
+
+I faded into insignificance.  Stenson was a man after the
+Inspector's heart.  A few eager questions brought the desired
+result.  A dark red toque with a grey bird's wing; a wine-
+coloured zouave jacket and skirt, black braided; a dark blue
+bodice; a plain gold brooch (the first trinket I had given her
+--the occasion of her first clasp of arms around my neck)
+fastening her collar; a silver fox necklet and muff; patent
+leather shoes and brown suede gloves.
+
+"Any special mark or characteristics?"
+
+"A white scar above the left temple," said Stenson.
+
+Lord have mercy!  The man has lived day by day for five months
+with Carlotta's magical beauty, and all he has noticed as
+characteristic is the little white scar--she fell on marble steps
+as a child--the only flaw, if flaw can be in a thing so
+imperceptible, in her perfect loveliness.
+
+"Mademoiselle has also a tiny mole behind her right ear," said
+Stenson.
+
+The Inspector's conception of Stenson expanded into an
+apotheosis.  He paid him deference.  His pen wrote greedily every
+syllable the inspired creature uttered.  When the fount of
+inspiration ran dry, Stenson turned to me with his imperturbable,
+profoundly respectful air.
+
+"Shall I return home, Sir Marcus, or have you any further need of
+my service?"
+
+I bade him go home.  He withdrew.  The Inspector smiled
+cheerfully.  "Now we can get along," said he.  "It's a pity Mr.
+--Mr. Pasquale" (he consulted his notes) "is out of touch with us
+for the moment.  He might have given us great assistance."
+
+He rose from his chair.  "I think we shall very soon trace the
+young lady.  An accurate personal description like this, you see,
+is invaluable."
+
+He handed me the printed form which he had filled in.  In spite
+of my misery I almost laughed at the fatuity of the man in
+thinking that those mere unimaginative statistics applicable to
+five hundred thousand young females in London, could in any way
+express Carlotta.
+
+"This is all very well," said I; "but the first thing to do is to
+lay that Turkish devil by the heels."
+
+"You can count on our making the most prompt and thorough
+investigation," said he.
+
+"And in the mean time what can I do?"
+
+"Your best course, Sir Marcus," he answered, "is to go home and
+leave things in our hands.  As soon as ever we have the slightest
+clue, we shall communicate with you."
+
+He bowed me out politely.  In a few moments I found myself in the
+greyness of the autumn afternoon wandering on the Thames
+Embankment like a lost soul on the banks of Phlegethon.  It
+seemed as if I had never seen the sun, should never see the sun
+again.  I was drifting sans purpose into eternity.
+
+I passed by some railings.  A colossal figure looming through the
+misty air struck me with a sense of familiarity.  It was the
+statue of Sir Bartle Frere, and these were the gardens beneath
+the terrace of the National Liberal Club.  It was here that I had
+first met her.  The dripping trees seemed to hold the echo of the
+words spoken when their leaves were green: "Will you please to
+tell me what I shall do?"  I strained my eyes to see the bench on
+which I had sat, and my eyes tricked me into translating a blurr
+at the end of the seat into the ghostly form of Carlotta.  My
+misery overwhelmed me; and through my misery shot a swift pang of
+remorse at having treated her harshly on that sweet and memorable
+afternoon in May.
+
+I turned the corner at Whitehall Place and looked down the
+desolate gardens.  The benches were empty, the trees were bare,
+"and no birds sang." I crossed the road.
+
+The Hotel Metropole.  The great doors stood invitingly open, and
+from the pavement one could see the warmth and colour of the
+vestibule.  Here was staying the ArchDevil who had robbed me of
+my life.  I stood for a moment under the portico shaking with
+rage.  I must have lost consciousness for a few seconds for I do
+not remember entering or mounting the stairs.  I found myself at
+the bureau asking for Hamdi Effendi.  No, he had not left.  They
+thought he was in the hotel.  A page despatched in search of him
+departed with my card, bawling a number.  I hate these big
+caravanserais where one is a mere number, as in a gaol.  "Would
+to heaven it were a gaol," I muttered to myself, "and this were
+the number of Hamdi Effendi!"
+
+A lean man rose from a chair and, holding out his hand,
+effusively saluted me by name.  I stared at him.  He recalled our
+acquaintance at Etretat.  I fished him up from the deeps of a
+previous incarnation and vaguely remembered him as a young
+American floral decorator who used to preach to me the eternal
+doctrine of hustle.  I shook hands with him and hoped that he was
+well.
+
+"Going very strong.  Never stronger.  Never so well as when I'm
+full up with work.  But you don't hurry around enough in this
+dear, sleepy old country.  Men lunch.  In New York all the lunch
+one has time for is to swallow a plasmon lozenge in a street-car."
+
+His high pitched voice shrieked bombastic platitude into my ears
+for an illimitable time.  I answered occasionally with the fringe
+of my mind.  Could my agonised state of being have remained
+unperceived by any human creature save this young, hustling,
+dollar-centred New York floral decorator?
+
+"Since we met, guess how many times I've crossed the Atlantic.
+Four times!"
+
+Long-suffering Atlantic!
+
+"And about yourself.  Still going _piano, piano_ with books and
+things?"
+
+"Yes, books and things," I echud.
+
+The page came up and announced Hamdi's intention of immediate
+appearance.
+
+"And how is that charming young lady, your ward, Miss Carlotta?"
+continued my tormentor.
+
+"Yes," I answered hurriedly.  "A charming young lady.  You used
+to give her sweets.  Have you noticed that a fondness for sugar
+plums induces an equanimity of character?  It also spoils the
+teeth.  That is why the front teeth of all American women are so
+bad."
+
+I must be endowed with the low cunning of the fox, who, I am
+told, by a swift turn puts his pursuers off the scent.  The
+learned term the rhetorical device an _ignoratio elenchi_.  My
+young friend's patriotism rose in furious defence of his
+countrywomen's beauty.  I looked round the luxuriously furnished
+vestibule, wondering from which of the many doors the object of
+my hatred would emerge, and my young friend's talk continued to
+ruffle the fringe of my mind.
+
+"I'm afraid you're expecting some one rather badly," he remarked
+with piercing perceptiveness.
+
+"A dull acquaintance," said I.  "I shall be sorry when his
+arrival puts an end to our engaging conversation."
+
+Then the lift door opened and Hamdi stepped out like the Devil in
+an Alhambra ballet.
+
+He looked at my card and looked at me.  He bowed politely.
+
+"I did not know whom I should have the pleasure of seeing," said
+he in his execrable French.  "In what way can I be of service to
+Sir Marcus Ordeyne?"
+
+"What have you done with Carlotta?" I asked, glaring at him.
+
+His ignoble small-pox pitted face assumed an expression of bland
+inquiry.
+
+"Carlotta?"
+
+"Yes," said I.  "Where have you taken her to?"
+
+"Explain yourself, Monsieur," said Hamdi.  "Do I understand that
+Lady Ordeyne has disappeared?"
+
+"Tell me what you have done with her."
+
+His crafty features grew satanic; his long fleshy nose squirmed
+like the proboscis of one of Orcagna's fiends.
+
+"Really, Monsieur," said he, with a hideous leer--oh, words
+are impotent to express the ugliness of that face!  "Really,
+Monsieur, supposing I had stolen Miladi, you would be the last
+person I should inform of her whereabouts.  You are simple,
+Monsieur.  I had always heard that England was a country of
+arcadian innocence, so unlike my own black, wicked country, and
+now--" he shrugged his shoulders blandly, '_j'en suis convaincu_."
+
+"You may jeer, Hamdi Effendi," said I in a white passion of
+anger.  "But the English police you will not find so arcadian."
+
+"Ah, so you have been to the police?" said the suave villain.
+"You have gone to Scotland--Scotland Place Scotland--n'importe.
+They are investigating the affair?  I thank you for the friendly
+warning."
+
+"Warning!" I cried, choked with indignation.  He held up a soft,
+fat palm.
+
+"Ah--it is not a warning?  Then, Monsieur, I am afraid you have
+committed an indiscretion which your friends in Scotland Place
+will not pardon you.  You would not make a good police agent.  I
+am of the profession, so I know."
+
+I advanced a step.  He recoiled, casting a quick look backward at
+the lift just then standing idle with open doors.
+
+"Hamdi Effendi," I cried, "by the living God, if you do not
+restore me my wife--"
+
+But then I stopped short.  Hamdi had stepped quickly backward
+into the lift, and given a sign to the attendant.  The door
+slammed and all I could do was to shake my fist at Hamdi's boots
+as they disappeared upwards.
+
+I remember once in Italy seeing a cat playing with a partially
+stunned bat which, flying low, she had brought to the ground.
+She crouched, patted it, made it move a little, patted it again
+and retired on her haunches preparing for a spring.  Suddenly the
+bat shot vertically into the air.
+
+I stared at the ascending lift with the cat's expression of
+impotent dismay and stupefaction.  It was inconceivably
+grotesque.  It brought into my tragedy an element of infernal
+farce.  I became conscious of peals of laughter, and looking
+round beheld the American doubled up in a saddlebag chair.  I
+fled from the vestibule of the hotel clothed from head to foot in
+derision.
+
+
+I am at home, sitting at my work-table, walking restlessly about
+the room, stepping out into the raw air on the balcony and
+looking for a sign down the dark and silent road.  I curse myself
+for my folly in entering the Hotel Metropole.  The damned Turk
+held me in the palm of his hand.  He made mock of me to his
+heart's content ....  And Carlotta is in his power.  I grow white
+with terror when I think of _her_ terror.  She is somewhere,
+locked up in a room, in this great city.  My God!  Where can she
+be?
+
+The police must find her.  London is not mediaeval Italy for
+women to be gagged and carried off to inaccessible strongholds in
+defiance of laws and government.  I repeat to myself that she
+must come back, that the sober working of English institutions
+will restore her to my arms, that my agony is a matter of a day
+or two at most, that the special license obtained this morning
+and now lying before me is not the document of irony it seems,
+and that in a week's time we shall look back on this nightmare of
+a day with a smile, and look forward to the future with laughter
+in our hearts.
+
+But to-night I am very lonely.  "Loneliness," says Epictetus, "is
+a certain condition of the helpless man."  And I am helpless.
+All my aid lies in the learning in those books; and all the
+learning in all those books on all sides from floor to ceiling
+cannot render me one infinitesimal grain of practical assistance.
+If only Pasquale, man of action, swift intelligence, were here!
+I can only trust to the trained methods of the unimaginative
+machine who has set out to trace Carlotta by means of the scar on
+her forehead and the mole behind her ear.  And meanwhile I am
+very lonely.  My sole friend, to whom I could have turned, Mrs.
+McMurray, is still at Bude.  She is to have a child, I
+understand, in the near future, and will stay in Cornwall till
+the confinement is over.  Her husband, even were he not amid the
+midnight stress of his newspaper office, I should shrink from
+seeking.  He is a Niagara of a man.  Judith--I can go to her no
+more.  And though Antoinette has wept her heart out all day long,
+poor soul, and Stenson has conveyed by his manner his respectful
+sympathy, I cannot take counsel of my own servants.  I have
+gathered into my arms the one-eyed cat, and buried my face in his
+fur--where Carlotta's face has been buried.  "That's the way I
+should like to be kissed!"  Oh, my dear, my dear, were you here
+now, that is the way I should kiss you !
+
+I have gone upstairs and wandered about her room.  Antoinette has
+prepared it for her reception to-night, as usual.  The corner of
+the bedclothes is turned down, and her night-dress, a gossamer
+thing with cherry ribbons, laid out across the bed.  At the foot
+lie the familiar red slippers with the audacious heels; her
+dressing-gown is thrown in readiness over the back of a chair;
+even the brass hot water can stands in the basin--and it is still
+hot.  And I know that the foolish woman is wide-awake overhead
+waiting for her darling.  I kissed the pillow still fragrant of
+her where her head rested last night, and I went downstairs with
+a lump in my throat.
+
+Again I sit at my work-table and, to save myself from going mad
+with suspense, jot down in my diary* the things that have
+happened.  Put in bald words they scarcely seem credible.
+
+
+* It will be borne in mind that I am writing these actual pages,
+afterwards, at Verona, amplifying the rough notes in my diary. M.
+O.
+
+
+A sudden clattering, nerve-shaking, strident peal at the front-
+door bell.
+
+I flew down the stairs.  It was news of Carlotta.  It was
+Carlotta herself brought back to me.  My heart swelled with joy
+as if it would burst.  I knew that as I opened the door Carlotta
+would fall laughing, weeping, sobbing into my arms.
+
+I opened the door.  It was only a police officer in plain
+clothes.
+
+"Sir Marcus Ordeyne?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"We have traced the young lady all right.  She left London by the
+two-twenty Continental express from Victoria with Mr. Sebastian
+Pasquale."
+
+
+
+
+                         CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+November 1st.
+
+Five days ago the blow fell, and I am only now recovering; only
+now awakening to the horrible pain of it.
+
+I have gone about like a man in a dream.  Blurred visages of men
+with far-away voices have saluted me at the club.  Innumerable
+lines of print which my eyes have scanned have been destitute of
+meaning.  I have forced myself to the mechanical task of copying
+piles of rough notes for my History; I have been able to bring
+thereto not an atom of intelligence; popes, princes, painters are
+a category of disassociated names, less evocative of ideas than
+the columns in the Post Office London Directory.  I have stared
+stupidly into the fire or at the dripping branches of the trees
+opposite my windows.  I have walked the streets in dull misery.
+I have sought solace in the Zoological Gardens.
+
+There is a kindly brown bear who pleads humanly for buns, and her
+I have fed into a sort of friendship.  I stand vacantly in front
+of the cage finding in the beast an odd companionable sympathy.
+She turns her head on one side, regards me with melting brown
+eyes, and squatting on her haunches thrusts her paws beseechingly
+through the bars.  Just so did Carlotta beseech and plead.  I
+have bemused myself with gnostic and metempsychosic speculations.
+Carlotta as an ordinary human being with an immortal soul did not
+exist, and what I had known and loved was but a simulacrum of
+female form containing an elemental spirit doomed to be ever
+seeking a fresh habitat.  It was but the lingering ghost of the
+humanised shell of air that was seen at Victoria station.  The
+fateful spirit, untrammelled by the conventions of men and
+actuated by destinies unintelligible to mortal mind, had informed
+the carcass of this little brown bear, which looks at me so
+strangely, so coaxingly, with Carlotta's eyes and Carlotta's
+gestures.  I asked her yesterday to come back to me.  I said that
+the house was empty; that the rooms ached for the want of her.  I
+pleaded so passionately and the eyes before me so melted that I
+thought her heart was touched.  But in the midst of it all
+another visitor came up and the creature uttered a whining plaint
+and put out her paw for buns--by which token I felt indeed that
+it was Carlotta.
+
+
+I have accepted the blow silently.  As yet I have told no one.  I
+have made no inquiries.  When a man is betrayed by his best
+friend and deserted by the woman he loves, time and solitude are
+the only comforters.  Besides, to whom should I go for comfort?
+I have lived too remote from my kind, and my kind heeds me not.
+
+Not a line has reached me from Carlotta.  She has gone out of my
+life as lightly and as remorselessly as she went out of Hamdi
+Effendi's; as she went, for aught she knew, out of that of the
+unhappy boy who lured her from Alexandretta.  If she heard I was
+dead, I wonder whether she would say: "I am so glad!"
+
+Whether the flight was planned between them, or whether Pasquale
+waylaid her on her way to the Avenue Road and then and there
+proposed that she should accompany him, I do not know.  It
+matters very little.  She is gone.  That is the one awful fact
+that signifies.  No explanations, pleas for forgiveness could
+make me suffer less.  Were she different I might find it in my
+heart to hate her.  This I cannot do.  How can one hate a thing
+devoid of heart and soul?  But one can love it--God knows how
+blindly.  So I have locked the door of Carlotta's room and the
+key is in my possession.  It shall not be touched.  It shall
+remain just as she left it--and I shall mourn for her as for one
+dead.
+
+For Pasquale--if I were of his own reversionary type, I should
+follow him half across Europe till we met, and then one of us
+would kill the other.  In one respect he resembles Carlotta.  He
+is destitute of the moral sense.  How else to solve the enigma?
+How else to reconcile his flamboyant chivalry towards the
+consumptive washer-woman with the black treachery towards me, in
+which even at that very moment his mind must have been steeped?
+I knew that he had betrayed many, that where women were concerned
+no considerations of honour or friendship had stood between him
+and his desires; but I believed--for what reason save my own
+egregious vanity, I know not--that for me he had a peculiar
+regard.  I believed that it was an idiosyncrasy of this wolf to
+look upon my sheepfold as sacred from his depredations.  I was
+ashamed of any doubts that crossed my mind as to his loyalty, and
+did not hesitate to thrust my lamb between his jaws.  And while
+he was giving the lie direct to my faith, I, poor fool, in my
+despair was seeking madly for his aid in the deliverance of my
+darling from the power of the dog.
+
+I have felt I owe Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that,
+in the midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I
+should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct.  But, on
+the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the
+pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter?
+For all the deeper suffering, I am conscious of writhing under
+lacerated vanity when I think of that grotesque and humiliating
+blunder in the Hotel Metropole.
+
+
+November 2d.
+
+I have received news of the death of old Simon McQuhatty.  In my
+few lucid moments of late I had been thinking of seeking his
+kindly presence.  Now Gossip Death has taken him out across the
+moor.  Now, dear old pagan, he is
+
+            "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
+               With rocks and stones and trees."
+
+
+November 3d.
+
+Antoinette came up this morning with a large cardboard box
+addressed to Carlotta.  The messenger who brought it was waiting
+downstairs.
+
+"I came to Monsieur to know whether I should send it back," said
+Antoinette, on the verge of tears.
+
+"No," said I, "leave it here."
+
+From the furrier's label, I saw that the box contained some furs
+I had ordered for Carlotta a fortnight ago--she shivered so, poor
+child, in this wintry climate.
+
+"But, Monsieur," began Antoinette, "the poor angel--"
+
+"May want it in heaven," said I.
+
+The good woman stared.
+
+"We'll be like the ancient Egyptians, Antoinette," I explained,
+"who placed food and wine and raiment and costly offerings in the
+tombs of the departed, so that their shades could come and enjoy
+them for all eternity.  We'll have to make believe, Antoinette,
+that this is a tomb, for one can't rear a pyramid in London,
+though it is a desert sufficiently vast; and the little second
+floor room is the inner sanctuary where the body lies in silence
+embalmed with sweet spices and swathed in endless bands of
+linen."
+
+"But Mademoiselle is not dead?" cried Antoinette, with a shiver.
+"How can Monsieur talk of such things?  It makes me fear, the way
+Monsieur speaks."
+
+"It makes me fear, too, Antoinette," said I, gravely.
+
+When she had gone I took the box of furs upstairs and laid it
+unopened on Carlotta's bed and came away, relocking the door
+behind me.
+
+
+November 9th.
+
+I have formed a great resolution.  I have devoted the week to the
+envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the
+solution came to me as something final and irrevocable.
+Mistrusting the counsels of the night, when the brain is unduly
+excited by nervous insomnia, I have applied the test of a day's
+cold reason.
+
+I have broken a woman's heart.  I have spurned the passionate
+love of a woman who has been near and dear to me; a woman of
+great nature; a woman of subtle brain who has been my chosen
+companion, my equal partner in any intellectual path I chose to
+tread; a sensitive lady, with all the graciousness of soul that
+term conveys.  Heaven knows what a woman can see in me to love.
+I look in the glass at my bony, hawk-like face, on which the
+stamp of futility seems eternally set, and I am seized with a
+prodigious wonder; but the fact remains that to me unlovely and
+unworthy has been given that thing without price, a woman's love.
+I remember Pasquale laughing merrily at this valuation.  He said
+the love of women was as cheap as dirt, and the only use for it
+was to make mud pies.  The damned cynical villain!  "Always
+reflect," said he, on another occasion, "that although a man may
+be as ugly as sin, the probability is that he is just as
+pleasant.  Beauties will find hitherto unsuspected amenities in
+Beasts till the end of time."  But I am such a poor and sorry
+Beast, without the chance of a transformation; a commonplace
+Beast, dull and didactic; a besotted, purblind, despicable Beast!
+Yet Judith loved me.  Instead of thanking on my knees the high
+gods for the boon conferred, I rejected it, and went mad for
+craving of the infinitely lesser glory of Carlotta's baby lips
+and gold-bronze hair.  I have broken Judith's heart.  I will
+expiate the crime I have committed.
+
+Expiate the crime!  The realisation of the meaning of the words
+covers me with shame.  As if what I propose will be a sorry
+penance!  That is the danger of a man thinking, as I have always
+done, in metaphors.  It has given me my loose, indirect views of
+life, of myself, of those around me.  If I had advice to offer to
+a young man, I should say: "Learn to think straight."  Expiate,
+indeed!  I will go to her and make confession.  I will tell her
+that awful loneliness is crushing my soul.  I will kneel before
+her and beseech her of her great woman's goodness to give me her
+love again, and to be my helpmeet and my companion who will be
+cherished with all that there is of loyalty in me to her life's
+end.  She will pity me a little, for I have suffered, and I will
+pity her tenderly, in deep sincerity, and our life together will
+be based on that all-understanding which signifies all-
+forgiveness.  And it shall be a real life together.  I used to
+smile, in a superior way, at her dread of solitude.  Heaven
+forgive me.  I did not then know its terrors.  It comforted for
+the first few benumbed days, but now it is gathering around me
+like a mysterious and appalling force.  I crave the human
+presence in my home.  I need the woman's presence in my heart.
+
+We shall live together then as man and wife, in defiance of the
+world.  Let the moralists blame us.  We shall not care.  It will
+make little social difference to Judith, and as for myself, have
+I not already inflicted public outrage on society?  does not my
+Aunt Jessica regard me as a wringer of the public conscience, and
+does not my Cousin Rosalie mention me with a shudder of horror in
+her tepid prayers?  If I really give them cause for reprobation
+they will be neither wiser, nor better, nor sorrier.  And if the
+baronetcy flickers out in unseemly odour, I for one shall know
+that the odour is sweeter than that wherein it was lighted, when
+my great-grandfather earned the radiance by services rendered at
+Brighton to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent.  This is the
+only way in which I can make Judith reparation, the only way in
+which I can find comfort.  We shall travel.  Italy, beloved of
+Judith, is calling me.  Probably Florence will be our settled
+home.  I shall give up this house of madness.  The clean sweet
+love of Judith will purify my heart of this poisonous passion,
+and in the end there will be peace.
+
+
+I have taken Carlotta's photograph from its frame and cast it
+into the fire, thus burning her for her witchcraft.  I watched
+the flames leap and curl.  The last look she gave me before they
+licked away her face had its infinite allurement, its devilish
+sorcery so intensified in the fierce yellow light, that the
+yearning for her clutched me by the throat and shook me through
+all my being.
+
+
+But it is over now.  I have done with Carlotta.  If she thinks I
+am going to sit and let the wind which comes over Primrose Hill
+drive me mad like Gastibelza, _l'homme a la carabine_, in Victor
+Hugo's poem, she is vastly mistaken.  From this hour henceforth I
+swear she is nothing to me; I will eat and sleep and laugh as if
+she had never existed.  Polyphemus, curled up in Carlotta's old
+place on the sofa, regards me with his sardonic eye.  He is an
+evil, incredulous, mocking beast, who a few centuries ago would
+have been burned with his late mistress
+
+I am sane and happier now that I have come to my irrevocable
+determination.
+
+To-morrow I go to Judith.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+November 10th.
+
+
+I had to ring twice before Judith's servant opened the flat door.
+
+"Mrs. Mainwaring is engaged just at present, Sir Marcus."
+
+"Ask her if I can come in and wait, as I have something of
+importance to say to her."
+
+She left me standing in the passage, a thing that had never
+before occurred to me in Judith's establishment, and presently
+returned with her answer.  Would I mind waiting in the dining-
+room?  I entered.  The table was littered with sheets of her
+statistical work and odd bits of silk' and lining.  A type-writer
+stood at one end and a sewing-machine at the other.  On the
+writing-desk by the window, in the midst of a mass of letters and
+account-books, rested a large bowl filled with magnificent blooms
+of white and yellow chrysanthemums.  A volume of Dante lay open
+face downwards on the corner.  It did my heart good to see this
+untidiness, so characteristic of Judith, so familiar, so
+intimate.  She had taken her trouble bravely, I reflected.  The
+ordinary daily task had not been left undone.  Through all she
+had preserved her valiant sanity.  I felt rebuked for my own loss
+of self-control.
+
+I was about to turn away from the litter of the desk, when my eye
+caught sight of an envelope bearing a French stamp and addressed
+in Pasquale's unmistakable handwriting.  As there seemed to be a
+letter inside, I did not take it up to examine it more closely.
+The glance was enough to assure me that it came from Pasquale.
+Why should he be corresponding with Judith?  I walked away
+puzzled.  Was it a justification, a confession, a plea to her as
+my friend to obtain my forgiveness?  If there is one thing more
+irritating than another it is to light accidentally upon a
+mystery affecting oneself in a friend's correspondence.  One can
+no more probe deeply into it than one can steal the friend's
+spoons.  It seems an indiscretion to have noticed it, an
+unpardonable impertinence to subject it to conjecture.  In spite
+of my abhorring the impulse of curiosity, the sweeping,
+flaunting, swaggering handwriting of Pasquale worried me.
+
+Judith came in, looking much as she had done on the occasion of
+my last visit, worn and anxious, with a strange expression in her
+eyes.
+
+"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," she said, extending a
+lifeless hand.
+
+I raised it to my lips.
+
+"I would have gladly waited all day to see you, Judith," I said.
+
+"Really?"
+
+She laughed in an odd way.
+
+"And idle speech from me to you at the present time would be an
+outrage," I answered.  "I have passed through much since I saw
+you last."
+
+"So have I," said Judith.  "More than you imagine.  Well," she
+continued as I bowed my head accepting the rebuke, "what have you
+got so important to tell me?"
+
+"Much," said I.  "In the first place you must be aware of what
+has happened, for I can't help seeing there a letter from
+Pasquale."
+
+She glanced swiftly at the desk and back again at me.
+
+"Yes," she replied, "he is in Paris."
+
+I was amazed at her nonchalance.
+
+"Has he told you nothing?"
+
+"Perhaps Sir Marcus Ordeyne would like to see his letter," she
+said, ironically.
+
+"You know perfectly well that I would not read it," said I.
+
+Judith laughed again, and rolled her handkerchief into a little
+ball between her nervous fingers.
+
+"Forgive me," she said.  "I like to see the _grand seigneur_ in
+you now and then.  It puts me in mind of happier days.  But about
+Pasquale--the only thing he tells me is that he is not able to
+execute a commission for me.  He told me on the night he drove me
+home that he was going to Paris, and I asked him to get me some
+cosmetic.  Carmine Badouin, if you want to know.  I have got to
+rouge now before I am fit to be seen in the street.  I am quite
+frank about it."
+
+"Then you know nothing of Carlotta?" I cried.
+
+"Carlotta?"
+
+"She eloped with that double-dyed, damned, infernal villain, the
+day after I saw you."
+
+Judith looked at me for a moment, then closed her eyes and turned
+her head away, resting her hand on the table.  My indignation
+waxed hot against the scoundrel.  How dare he write casual
+letters to Judith about Carmine Badouin with his treachery on his
+conscience?  I know the terms of flippant grace in which the
+knave couched this precious epistle.  And I could see Carlotta
+reading over his shoulder and clapping her hands and cooing: "Oh,
+that is so funny!"
+
+When I had told Judith the outlines of the story, pacing up and
+down the little room while she remained motionless by the table,
+she put out her hand to me, and in a low voice, and with still
+averted eyes said that she was sorry, deeply sorry.  Her tone
+rang so true and loyal that my heart throbbed with quick
+appreciation of her high nature, and I wrung her outstretched
+hand.
+
+"God bless you, Judith," I cried, fervently.  "Bless you for your
+sweet sympathy.  Be sorry for me only as for a man who has passed
+through the horrors of delirium.  But for me as I stand before
+you now, I ask you not to be sorry.  I have come to bring you, if
+I can, dear Judith, a measure of gladness, perhaps of happiness."
+
+She wrenched herself free from me, and a terrified cry of
+"Marcus!" checked my dithyrambic appeal.  She shrank away so that
+a great corner of the dining-table separated us, and she stared
+at me as though my words hats been the affrighting utterance of a
+madman.
+
+"Marcus!  What do you mean?" she cried, with an unnatural
+shrillness in her voice.
+
+"I mean," said I, "I mean--I mean that 'crushed by three days'
+pressure, my three days' love lies slain.'  Time has withered him
+at the root.  I have buried him deep in unconsecrated ground,
+like a vampire, with a stake through his heart.  And I have come
+back to you, Judith, humbly to crave your forgiveness and your
+love--to tell you I have changed, dear--to offer you all I have
+in the world if you will but take it--to give you my life, my
+daily, hourly devotion.  My God!" I cried, "don't you believe
+me?"
+
+She still stared at me in a frightened way, leaning heavier on
+the table.  Her lips twitched before they could frame the words
+
+"Yes, I believe you.  You have never lied to me."
+
+"Then in the name of love and heaven," I cried, "why do you look
+at me like that?"
+
+She trembled, evidently suppressing something with intense
+effort, whether bitter laughter, indignation or a passionate
+outburst I could not tell.
+
+"You ask why?" she said, unsteadily.  "Because you seem like the
+angel of the flaming vengeance."
+
+At these astounding words it was my turn to look amazed.
+
+"Vengeance?" I echud.  "What wrong have you done me or any living
+creature?  Come, my dear," and I moved nearer by seating myself
+on the corner of the table, close to the type-writer, and leaning
+towards her, "let us look at this thing soberly.  If ever a man
+had need of woman I have need of you.  I can live alone no
+longer.  We must share one home henceforth together.  We can snap
+our fingers at the world, you and I.  If you have anything to say
+against the proposal, let us discuss it calmly."
+
+Judith's slender figure vibrated like a cord strung to
+breaking-point.  Her voice vibrated.
+
+"Yes, let us discuss it calmly.  But not here.  The sight of you
+sitting in the middle of my life, between the sewing-machine and
+the type-writer, is getting on my nerves.  Let us go into the
+drawing-room.  There is an atmosphere of calm there--" her voice
+quavered in a queer little choke--"of sabbatical calm."
+
+I slid quickly from the table and put my arm round her waist.
+
+"Tell me, Judith, what is amiss with you."
+
+She broke away from me roughly, thrusting me back.
+
+"Nothing.  A woman's nothing, if you understand what that means.
+Come into the drawing-room."
+
+I opened the door; she passed out and I followed her along the
+passage.  She preceded me into the drawing-room, and I stayed for
+a moment to close the door, fumbling with the handle which has
+been loose for some months.  When I turned and had made a couple
+of steps forward, I halted involuntarily under the shock of a
+considerable surprise.
+
+We were not alone.  Standing on the hearth-rug, his hands behind
+his back, his brows bent on me benevolently was a man in clerical
+attire.  He looked ostentatiously, exaggeratedly clerical.  His
+clerical frock-coat was of inordinate length; his boots were
+aggravatingly clump-soled; by a very large white tie, masking the
+edges of a turned-down collar, he proclaimed himself Evangelical.
+An otherwise clean-shaven florid face was adorned with brown
+side-whiskers growing rather long.  A bald, shiny head topped a
+fringe of brown hair.
+
+I stared at this unexpected gentleman for a second or two, and
+then, recovering my self-possession, looked enquiringly at
+Judith.
+
+"Sir Marcus," she said, "let me introduce my husband, Mr. Rupert
+Mainwaring."
+
+Her husband!  This benevolent Evangelical parson her husband!
+But the brilliant gallant who had dazzled her eyes?  The
+dissolute scoundrel that had wrecked her life?  Where was he?
+Dumfounded, I managed to bow politely enough, but my stupefaction
+was covered by Judith rushing across the room and uttering a
+strange sound which resolved itself into a shrill, hysterical
+laugh as she reached the door which she opened and slammed behind
+her.  I heard her scream hysterically in the passage; then the
+slam of another door; and the silence told me that she had shut
+herself in her bedroom.  Disregarding the new husband's presence,
+I rang the bell, and the servant who had left her kitchen on
+hearing the scream entered immediately.
+
+"Go to your mistress.  She is ill," said I.
+
+The maid hurriedly departed.  The parson and I looked at one
+another.
+
+"I am afraid," said I, "that my presence is unhappily an
+intrusion.  I hope to make your better acquaintance on another
+occasion."
+
+"Oh, please don't go," said he, "my wife is only a little upset
+and will soon recover.  I beg that you will excuse her.  Besides,
+I should like to have a talk with you."
+
+He offered me a chair, my own chair, the comfortable, broad-
+seated Empire chair I had given Judith as a birthday present
+years ago, the chair in which I had invariably sat.  He did it
+with the manner of the master of the house, a most courteous
+gentleman.  The situation was fantastic.  Some ingenious devil
+must have conceived it by way of pandering to the after-dinner
+humour of the high gods.  As I sat down I rubbed my eyes.  Was
+this brown-whiskered, bald-headed clerical gentleman real?  The
+rubbing of my eyes dispelled no hallucination.  He was flesh and
+blood and still regarded me urbanely.  It was horrible.  The
+desertion of the scoundrelly husband, who I thought was lost
+somewhere in the cesspool of Europe, was the basis, the sanction
+of the relations between Judith and myself; and here was this
+reverend, respectable man apologising for his wife and begging me
+to be seated in my own chair.  The remark of Judith's that I
+should find sabbatical calm in the drawing-room occurred to me,
+and I had to grip the arms of the chair to prevent myself from
+joining Judith in her hysterics.
+
+The appearance of the husband in his legendary colours of
+rascality would have been a shock.  The sudden scattering of
+my plans for Judith's happiness I should have viewed with
+consternation.  But it would have been normal.  For him, however,
+to appear in the guise of an Evangelical clergyman, the very last
+kind of individual to be associated with Judith, was, I repeat,
+horribly fantastic.
+
+"I believe, Sir Marcus," said he, deliberately parting the tails
+of his exaggerated frock-coat and sitting down near me, " that
+you are a very great friend of my wife."
+
+I murmured that I had known Mrs. Mainwaring for some years.
+
+"You are doubtless acquainted with her unhappy history."
+
+"I have heard her speak of it," said I.
+
+"You must then share her surprise in seeing me here to-day.  I
+should like to assure you, as representing her friends and
+society and that sort of thing, as I have assured her, that I
+have not taken this step without earnest prayer and seeking the
+counsel of Almighty God."
+
+I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk
+lightly about seeking the counsel of Almighty God jars upon my
+sense of taste.  I stiffened at the sanctimonious tone in which
+the words were uttered.
+
+"You have without doubt very good reasons for coming back into
+the circle of her life," said I.
+
+"The best of all reasons," he replied, caressing a brown whisker,
+"namely, that I am a Christian."
+
+I liked him less and less.
+
+"Is that the reason, may I ask, why you remained away from her
+all these years?"
+
+"I deserve the scoff," said he: "Those were days of sin.  I
+deserve every humiliation that can be put upon me.  But I have
+since found the grace of God.  I found it at three o'clock in the
+afternoon on the eighth of January, eighteen hundred and--"
+
+"Never mind the year," I interrupted.
+
+My gorge rose.  The man was a sanctimonious Chadband.  He had
+come with nefarious designs on Judith's slender capital.  I saw
+knavery in the whites of his upturned eyes.
+
+"I should be glad," I continued quickly, "if you would come to
+the point of the conversation you desire to have with me.  I
+presume it concerns Mrs. Mainwaring.  She has reconciled herself
+to circumstances and has found means to regulate her life with a
+certain measure of contentment and comfort until now, when you
+suddenly introduce a disturbing factor.  You appear to wish to
+tell me your reasons for doing so--and I can't see what the grace
+of God has to do with it."
+
+He sprang to his feet and shot out both hands in the awkward
+gesture of an inspired English prophet.
+
+"But it has everything to do with it!  It is the beginning and
+end, core and kernel, root and branch of the matter.  It is the
+grace of God that checked me in the full career of my wickedness.
+It is the grace of God that has lighted my path ever since to
+holier things.  It is the grace of God that has changed me from
+what I was to what I am.  It is the grace of God that has brought
+me here to ask pardon on my knees of the woman I have wronged.
+The grace of God and of his son our Lord Jesus Christ, which came
+upon me in a great light on that January afternoon even as it did
+upon Saul of Tarsus.  The grace of God has everything to do with
+it."
+
+"Mr. Mainwaring," said I, "such talk is either blasphemous or--"
+
+He did not allow me to state the alternative, but caught up the
+word in a great cry.
+
+"Blasphemous!  Why, man alive! for what are you taking me?  Do
+you think this is some unholy jest?  Can't you see that I am in
+deadly earnest?  Come and see me where I live--" he caught me by
+the arm, as if he would drag me away then and there, "among the
+poor in Hoxton.  You scarcely know where Hoxton is--I didn't when
+I was a man of ease like yourself--that wilderness of grey
+despair where the sun of the world scarcely shines, let alone the
+Light of God.  Come and see for yourself, man, whether I am
+lying!"
+
+Then it dawned upon me that the man had been talking from
+innermost depths, that he was almost terrifyingly sincere.
+
+"I must ask you to pardon me," said I, "for appearing to doubt
+your good faith.  You must attribute it to my entire
+unfamiliarity with the terms of Evangelical piety."
+
+He looked at me queerly for a moment, and then, in the quiet
+tones of a man of the world, said, smiling pleasantly:
+
+"Very many years ago I had the pleasure of knowing your
+grandfather, the late baronet.  May I say that you remind me of
+him?"
+
+I have never heard an apology more gracefully and tactfully
+accepted.  For an unregenerate second he had become the gallant
+Rupert Mainwaring again, and showed me wherein might lie his
+attraction.
+
+"Pray be seated," said he, more gravely, "and allow me to
+explain."
+
+He unfolded his story.  It was well, said he, that an outsider (I
+an outsider in that familiar room!) should hear it.  I was at
+liberty to make it public.  Indeed, publicity was what he
+earnestly craved.  As far as my memory serves me, for my wits
+were whirling as I listened, the following is an epitome of his
+narrative:
+
+He had been a man of sin--not only in the vague ecclesiastical
+sense, but in downright, practical earnest.  He had committed
+every imaginable crime, save the odd few that lead to penal
+servitude and the gallows.  He drank, he betrayed women, he
+cheated at cards, he had an evil reputation on the turf.  His
+companions were chosen from the harlotry and knavery of the
+civilised world.  He had lured Judith from her first husband,
+thus breaking his heart, poor man, so that he died soon after.
+He had married Judith, and had deserted her for a barmaid whom in
+her turn he had abandoned.  He wallowed, to use his own
+expression, in the trough of iniquity.  He was, as I had always
+understood, about as choice a blackguard as it would be possible
+to meet outside a gaol.  One day a pretty girl, whom he had been
+following in the street, unwittingly enticed him into a
+revivalist meeting.  He described that meeting so vividly that
+had my stupefied mind been capable of fresh emotions, I too might
+have been converted at second hand by the revivalist preacher.
+He repeated parts of the sermon, rose to his feet, waved his
+arms, thundered out the commonplaces of Salvation Army
+Christianity, as if he had made an amazing theological discovery.
+It was pathetic.  It was ludicrous.  It was also inconceivably
+painful.  At last he mopped his forehead and shiny head.
+
+"Before that meeting was over I was on my knees praying beside
+the girl whom I had designed to ruin.  I went into the streets a
+converted man, filled with the grace of God.  I resolved to
+devote my life to saving souls for Christ.  My old habits of sin
+fell away from me like a garment.  I studied for the ministry.  I
+am now in deacon's orders, and I am the incumbent of a little tin
+mission church in Hoxton.  God moves in a mysterious way, Sir
+Marcus."
+
+"He is generally credited with doing so," said I, stupidly.
+
+"You are doubtless wondering, Sir Marcus," he went on, "why I
+placed such a long interval between my awakening and my
+communicating with my wife.  I set myself a period of probation.
+I desired to be assured of God's will.  It was essential that I
+should test my strength of purpose, and my power of making a
+life's atonement, as far as the things of this world are
+concerned, for the wrongs I have inflicted on her.  I have come
+now to offer her a Christian home."
+
+I looked at him open-mouthed.
+
+"Do you expect Judith to go and live with you as your wife, in
+Hoxton?" I asked, bluntly.
+
+"Why not?  She is my wife."
+
+I rose and walked about the room in agitation.  Somehow such a
+contingency had not entered my bewildered head.
+
+"Why not, Sir Marcus?" he repeated.
+
+"Because Judith isn't that kind of woman at all," I said,
+desperately.  "She doesn't like Hoxton, and would be as much out
+of place in a tin-mission church as I should be in a cavalry
+charge."
+
+"God will see to her fitness," said he, gravely.  "To him all
+things are easy."
+
+"But she has considerable philosophic doubt as to his personal
+existence," I cried.
+
+He smiled prophetically and waved away her doubt with a gesture.
+
+"I have no fears on that score," he observed.
+
+"But it is preposterous," I objected once more, changing my
+ground; "Judith craves the arrears of gaiety and laughter which
+your conduct caused life to leave owing to her.  She loves bright
+dresses, cigarettes, and wine and the things that are anathema in
+an Evangelical household."
+
+"My wife will find the gaiety and laughter of holiness," replied
+the fanatic.  "She will not be stinted of money to dress herself
+with becoming modesty; and as for alcohol and tobacco, no one
+knows better than myself how easy it is to give them up."
+
+"You seem as merciless in your virtues as you were in your
+vices," said I.
+
+"I have to bring souls to Christ," he answered.
+
+"That doesn't appear to be the way," I retorted, "to bring them."
+
+"Pray remember, Sir Marcus," said he, bending his brows upon me,
+"that I did not ask you for suggestions as to the conduct of my
+ministry."
+
+"The general methods you adopt in the case of your congregation,"
+said I, "are matters of perfect indifference to me.  But I cannot
+see Judith imprisoned for life in a tin church without a protest.
+Your proposal reminds me of the Siennese who owed a victorious
+general more than they could possibly repay.  The legend goes  that
+they hanged him, in order to make him a saint after his death by
+way of reward.  I object to this sort of canonisation of Judith.
+And she will object, too.  You seem to leave her out of account
+altogether.  She is mistress of her own actions.  She has a will
+of her own.  She is not going to give up her comfortable flat off
+the Tottenham Court Road in order to dwell in Hoxton.  She won't
+go back to you under your conditions."
+
+He smiled indulgently and held out his hand to signify that the
+interview was over.
+
+"She will, Sir Marcus."
+
+Was there ever such a Torquemada of a creature?  I respect
+religion.  I respect this man's intense conviction of the reality
+of his conversion.  I can respect even the long frock coat and
+the long brown whiskers, which in the case of so dashing a
+worldling as Rupert Mainwaring were a deliberate and daily
+mortification of the flesh.  But I hold in shuddering detestation
+"the thumb-screw and the rack for the glory of the Lord," which
+he cheerfully contemplated applying to Judith.
+
+"Why on earth can't you let the poor woman alone?" I asked,
+ignoring his hand.
+
+"I am doing my duty to God and to her," said he.
+
+"With the result that you have driven her into hysterics."
+
+"She'll get over them," said he.
+
+"I wish you good-day," said I.  "We might talk together for a
+thousand years without understanding each other."
+
+"Pardon me," he retorted, with the utmost urbanity.  "I
+understand you perfectly."
+
+He accompanied me to the dining-room where I had left my hat and
+umbrella, and to the flat door which he politely opened.  When it
+shut behind me I felt inclined to batter it open again and to
+take Judith by main force from under his nose.  But I suppose I
+am pusillanimous.  I found myself in the street brandishing my
+umbrella like a flaming sword and vowing to perform all sorts of
+Paladin exploits, which I knew in my heart were futile.
+
+I hailed an omnibus in the Tottenham Court Road, and clambered to
+the top, though a slight drizzle was falling.  Why I did it I
+have not the remotest idea, for I abhor those locomotive engines
+of exquisite discomfort.  I had no preconceived notion of
+destination.  It was a moving thing that would carry me away from
+the Tottenham Court Road, away from the Rev. Rupert Mainwaring,
+away from myself.  I was the solitary occupant of the omnibus
+roof.  The rain fell, softly, persistently, soakingly.  I laughed
+aloud.
+
+I recognised the predestined irony of things that at every corner
+checks the course of the ineffectual man.
+
+
+
+CBAPTER XX
+
+
+November 11th.
+
+I wrote Judith a long letter last night, urging her to disregard
+the forfeited claims of her husband and to join her life
+definitely with mine.  I was cynical enough to feel that if such
+a proceeding annoyed the Rev. Rupert Mainwaring it would serve
+him right.  The fact of a man's finding religion and abjuring
+sack does not in itself exculpate him from wrongs which he has
+inflicted on his fellow-creatures in unregenerate days.
+Mainwaring deserved some punishment of which he seemed to have
+had remarkably little; for, mind you, his sack-cloth and ashes at
+Hoxton, although sincerely worn, are not much of a punishment to
+a man in his exalted mood.  Now, on the contrary, Judith deserved
+compensation, such as I alone was prepared to offer her in spite
+of conventional morality and the feelings of the Rev. Rupert
+Mainwaring.  Indeed, it seemed to be the only way of saving
+Judith from being worried out of her life by frantic appeals to
+embrace both himself and Primitive Christianity.  Her position
+was that of Andromeda.  Mine that of an unheroic Perseus,
+destined to deliver her from the monster--the monster whose lair
+is a little tin mission church in Hoxton.
+
+I wrote the letter in one of those periods of semi-vitality when
+the pulses of emotion throb weakly, and sensitiveness is dulled.
+To-day I have felt differently.  My nerves have been restrung.
+Something ironically vulgar, sordidly tragic has seemed to creep
+into my relations with Judith.
+
+To my great surprise Judith brought her answer in person this
+evening.  It is the first time she has entered my house; and her
+first words, as she looked all around her with a wistful smile
+referred to the fact.
+
+"It is almost just as I have pictured it--and I have pictured it-
+-do you know how often?"
+
+She was calmer, if not happier.  The haggard expression had given
+place to one of resignation.  I wheeled an arm-chair close to the
+fire, for she was cold, and she sank into it with a sigh of
+weariness.  I knelt beside her.  She drew off her gloves and put
+one hand on my head in the old way.  The touch brought me great
+comfort.  I thought that we had reached the quiet haven at last.
+
+"So you have come to me, Judith," I whispered.
+
+"I have come, dear," she said, "to tell you that I can't come."
+
+My heart sank.
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+We fenced a little.  She gave half reasons, womanlike, of which I
+proved the inadequacy.  I recapitulated the arguments I had used
+in my letter.  She met them with hints and vague allusions.  At
+last she cut the knot.
+
+"I am going back to my husband."
+
+I rose to my feet and echud the words.  She repeated them in a
+tone so mournfully distinct, that they had the finality of a
+death-knell.  I had nothing to say.
+
+"Before we part I must make my peace with you, Marcus," she said.
+"I have suddenly developed a conscience.  I always had the germs
+of it."
+
+"You were always the best and dearest woman in the world," I
+cried.
+
+"And I betrayed you, dear.  That letter from Pasquale told me
+about his flight with Carlotta.  I lied to you--but I was in a
+state bordering on madness."
+
+I rested my elbow on the mantel-piece and looked down on her.
+She appeared so sweet and fragile, like a piece of Dresden china,
+incapable of base actions.  As I did not speak she went on:
+"I did not mean to play into Pasquale's hands, Marcus.  Heaven
+knows I didn't--but I did play into them.  Do you remember that
+awful night and our talk the next morning?  I asked you not to
+see her all day--to mourn our dead love.  I knew you would keep
+your promise.  You are a man of sensitive honour.  If all men
+were like you, the world would be a beautiful place."
+
+"It would go to smash in a few weeks through universal
+incompetence," I murmured, with some bitterness.
+
+"There would be no meanness and treachery and despicable
+underhand doings.  Marcus, you must forgive me--I was a desperate
+woman fighting for my life's happiness.  I thought I would try
+one forlorn hope.  I kept you out of the way and came up here to
+see Carlotta.  Don't interrupt me, Marcus; let me finish.  I
+happened to meet her a hundred yards down the road, and we went
+into the Regent's Park.  We sat down and I told her about
+ourselves, and my love for you, and asked her to give you up.  I
+don't believe she understood, Marcus.  She laughed and threw
+stones at a little dog.  I recovered my senses and left her there
+and went home sick with shame and humiliation.  I knew Pasquale
+was in love with her, for he had told me so the night before, and
+asked me how the marriage could be stopped.  He didn't believe in
+your announcement to Hamdi Effendi.  But I never mentioned
+Pasquale to Carlotta, or hinted there might be another than you.
+I was loyal so far, Marcus.  And two or three days afterwards
+came Pasquale's letter.  And I waited for you, in a fearful joy.
+I knew you would come to me--and I was mad enough to think that
+time would heal--that you would forget--that we could have the
+dear past again--and I would teach you to love me.  But then,
+suddenly, without a word of warning--it has always been his way
+--appeared my husband.  After that, you came with your offer of
+shelter and comfort--and you seemed like the angel of the flaming
+vengeance.  For I had wronged you, dear--robbed you of your
+happiness.  If I hadn't prepared her mind for leaving you, she
+would never have run away.  If I had not done this, or if on the
+other hand you loved me, Marcus, I should perhaps have looked at
+things differently.  I am beginning to believe in God and to see
+his hand in it all.  I couldn't come and live with you as your
+wife, Marcus.  Things stronger even than my love for you forbid
+it.  Our life together would not be the sweet and gracious thing
+it has always been to me.  We have come to the parting of the
+ways.  I must follow my husband."
+
+I knew she spoke rightly.  When she is not swept away to
+hysterical action by her temperament, she has a perception
+exquisitely keen into the heart of truth.
+
+"The parting of the ways?" said I.  "Yes; but can't you rest at
+the cross-roads?  Can't you lead your present life--your husband
+and myself, both, just your friends?"
+
+"Rupert has need of me," she replied very quickly.  "He is a man
+in torment of soul.  He has gone to this extreme of religious
+fanaticism because he is still uncertain of himself.  We had
+another long talk to-day.  I may help him."
+
+"does he deserve the sacrifice of your life?"
+
+She did not take up my question directly; but sat for a few
+minutes with her chin on her hand looking into the fire.
+
+"He is a man of evil passions," she resumed, at last.  "Drink and
+women mainly dragged him down.  I knew the hell of it during the
+short time of our married life.  If he falls away now, he
+believes he is damned to all eternity.  He believes in the
+material torture--flames and devils and pitchforks--of damned
+souls.  He says in me alone lies his salvation.  I must go.  If
+the tin church gets too awful, I shall run over to Delphine
+Carrere for a week to steady my nerves."
+
+What could I say?  The abomination of desolation lay around about
+me.  I might have prated to her of my needs, wrung her heart with
+the piteousness of my appeal. _Cui bono?_ _I_ can't whine to
+women--or to men either, for the matter of that.  When I am by
+myself I can curse and swear, play Termagant and rehearse an
+extravaganza out-Heroding all the Herods that ever Heroded.  But
+before others--no.  I believe my great-grandfather, before he
+qualified for his baronetcy, was a gentleman.
+
+"But on these occasions," said I, "you will avoid a sequestered
+and meditative self."
+
+Her laugh got choked by a sob.
+
+"Do you remember that?  It is not so long ago--and yet it seems
+many, many years."
+
+We moralised generally, after the way of humans, who desire to
+postpone a moment of anguished speech.  She made the tour of my
+book-shelves.  Many of the books she had borrowed, and she
+recognised them as old friends.
+
+"Is that where Benvenuto Cellini has always lived?"
+
+"Yes," said I, running my hand along the row.  "He is in his
+century, among his companions.  He would be unhappy anywhere
+else."
+
+"And the History--how far has it gone?"
+
+I showed her the pile of finished manuscript, of which she
+glanced at a few pages.  She put it down hurriedly and turned
+away.
+
+"I can't see to read, just now, Marcus."
+
+Then she paused in front of her own photograph, the only one now
+on the mantel-piece.
+
+"Will you give me that back?"
+
+"Why should I?" I asked.
+
+"I would rather--I should not like you to burn it."
+
+"Burn it?  All I have left of you?"
+
+She turned swimming eyes on me.
+
+"You are good, Marcus--after what I have told you--you do not
+feel bitterly against me?"
+
+"For what?  For being quixotic?  For going to martyrdom for an
+ideal?"
+
+"You did not listen when I spoke about Carlotta?"
+
+"Oh, my dear!" said I.
+
+And now she has gone.  We kissed at parting--a kiss of
+remembrance and renunciation.  Shall we ever meet again?
+
+Darkness gathers round me, and I am tired, tired, and I would
+that I could sleep like Rip Van Winkle, and awake an old man,
+with an old man's passionless resignation; or better, awake not
+at all.  Such poor fools as I are better dead.
+
+I look back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little
+opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of
+them.  All these years I have been judging Judith with an
+ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent.  Verily I have been
+the fag end of wisdom.  So I forbear to judge her now.
+
+If I had loved Judith with the great passion of a man's love for
+woman, not all the converted rascals in Christendom could have
+come between us.
+
+And her seeing Carlotta--poor woman--what does it matter?  What
+did she say about Carlotta?  "She laughed and threw stones at a
+little dog."
+
+Oh, my God!
+
+
+November 12th
+
+This way madness lies.  I will leave the house in charge of
+Stenson and Antoinette and go abroad.  Something has put Verona
+into my head.  One place is as good as another, so long as it is
+not this house--this house of death and madness and crime--and
+Verona is in Italy, where I have always found peace.
+
+I will confess my madness.  This book is a record of my morals
+--the finished version of the farce the high gods have called on
+meto play.  I thought last night the curtain was rung down.  I
+was wrong.  Listen, and laugh as I do--if you can.
+
+I fixed myself to work to-day.  After all, I am not an idler.  I
+earn my right to live.  When I publish my History the world will
+be the richer by _something_, poor though it may be.  I vow I
+have been more greatly, more nobly employed of late years, than I
+was when I earned my living at school-slavery teaching to
+children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-
+cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their
+insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of
+thousands of their fellow-creatures--elementary mathematics.
+There is no more reason for any human being on God's earth to be
+acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of
+Triangles--unless he is a professional scientist, when he can
+begin to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer
+begins to specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy--than for
+him to be an expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon.
+I look back with feelings of shame and degradation to the days
+when, for the sake of a crust of bread, I prostituted my
+intelligence to wasting the precious hours of impressionable
+childhood, which could have been filled with so many beautiful
+and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and inhuman
+subject.  It trains the mind--it teaches boys to think, they say.
+It doesn't.  In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit
+into a school curriculum.  Its sacrosanctity saves
+educationalists an enormous amount of trouble, and its chief use
+is to enable mindless young men from the universities to make a
+dishonest living by teaching it to others, who in their turn may
+teach it to a future generation.
+
+I am mad to-night--why have I indulged in this diatribe against
+mathematics?  I must find some vent, I suppose.  I see now.  I
+was saying that I earned my right to live, that I am not an
+idler.  I cling strenuously to the claim.  A man cannot command
+respect, even his own, by the mere reason of his _vie
+sentimentale_.  And, after what I have done to-day, I must force
+my claim to the respect which on other grounds I have forfeited.
+
+I spent, then, my day in unremitting toil.  But this evening the
+horrible craving for her came over me.  Such a little thing
+brought it about.  Antoinette, who disapproves of the amorphous
+British lumps of sugar, has found some emporium where she can buy
+the regular parallelopiped of the Continent, and these she
+provides for my afterdinner coffee.  Absent-mindedly I dipped the
+edge of the piece of sugar into the liquid, before dropping it,
+and watched the brown moisture rise through the white crystals.
+Then I remembered.  It was an invariable practice of Carlotta's.
+She would keep the lump in the coffee to saturation-point between
+her fingers, and then hastily put it into her mouth, so that it
+should not crumble to pieces on the way.  If it did, there would
+be much laughter and wiping of skirts; and there would be a
+search through my dinner-jacket pockets for a handkerchief to dry
+the pink tips of her fingers.  She called the dripping lump a
+canard, like the French children.  It was such a trivial thing;
+but it brought back with a rush all the thousand dainty, foolish,
+captivating intimacies that made up the maddening charm of
+Carlotta.
+
+Yes, I am aware that there is no language spoken under heaven
+that can fitly express the doting folly of a man who can be
+driven mad by a piece of sugar soaked in coffee.  There is a
+ghastly French phrase not to be found in Lamartine,
+Chateaubriand, or any of the polite sentimentalists _avoir les
+sangs tournes de quelqu'un_.  It is so with me. _J'ai les sangs
+tournes d'elle_.  Somebody has said something somewhere about the
+passion of a man of forty.  It must have to do with the French
+phrase.
+
+I pushed my coffee aside untasted, and buried my head in my
+hands, longing, longing; eating my heart out for her.  The hours
+passed.  When the servants were abed, I stole upstairs to her
+room, left as it was on the night when Antoinette, hoping against
+hope, had prepared it for her reception.  I broke down.  Heaven
+knows what I did.
+
+I returned to the drawing-room filled with the blind rage that
+makes a man curse God and wish that he could die.  The fire was
+black, and I mechanically took up the poker to stir it.  A
+tempest of impotent anger shook my soul.  I saw things red before
+my eyes.  I had an execrable lust to kill.  I was alone amid a
+multitude of gibbering fiends.  As I stooped before the grate I
+felt something scrabble my shoulders.  I leapt back with a
+shriek, and saw standing on the mantel-shelf a black, one-eyed
+thing regarding me with an expression of infinite malice.  Before
+I knew what I had done, I had brought the iron down, with all my
+force, upon its skull, and it had fallen dead at my feet.
+
+_Finis coronat opus._
+
+
+November 22d.
+
+Verona:--I have abandoned the"History of Renaissance Morals."
+The dog's-eared MS. and the dusty pile of notes I have shot into
+a lumber heap in a corner of this room, where I sit and shiver by
+a little stove.  It is immense, marble, cold, comfortless,
+suggestive of "the vasty halls of death."  I have been here a
+week to-day.  I thought I should find rest.  I should breathe the
+atmosphere of Italy again.  I should ease my heart among the
+masterworks of Girolamo dai Libri and Cavazzola, and, in the
+presence of the blue castellated mountains they loved to paint,
+my spirit would even be as theirs.  In this old-world city, I
+fondly imagined, I should forget the Regent's Park, and attune my
+mind to the life that once filled its narrow streets.
+
+But nothing have I found save solitude.  I stood to-day before
+the mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago,
+and hated it with unreasoning hatred.  The Madonna belied the
+wreath-supported inscription above her head, _"Miseratrix virginum
+Regina nostri miserere,"_ and greeted me with a pitiless simper.
+The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of
+him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly
+plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot.  The picture was
+worse than meaningless.  It was insulting.  It drove me out of
+the Public Gallery.  Outside a grey mist veiled the hills and a
+fine penetrating rain was falling.  I crept home, and for the
+fiftieth time since I have been here, opened my "History of
+Renaissance Morals."  I threw it, with a final curse, into the
+corner.
+
+I loathe it.  I care not a fig for the Renaissance or its morals.
+I count its people but a pestilent herd of daubers, rhymers,
+cutthroats, and courtesans.  Their _hubris_ has lost its glamour
+of beauty and has coarsened into vulgar insolence.  They offend
+me by their riotous swagger, their insistence on the animal joy
+of living; chiefly by their perpetual reminiscence of Pasquale.
+
+Yet once they interested me greatly, filling with music and with
+colour the grey void of my life.  Whence has come the change?
+
+In myself.  To myself I have become a subject of excruciating
+interest.  To myself I am a vastly more picturesque personage
+than any debonair hooligan of quattro-cento Verona.  He has faded
+into the dullest (and most offensive) dog of a ghost.  I only
+exist.  This sounds like the colossal vanity of Bedlam.  Heaven
+knows it is not.  If you are racked with toothache from ear to
+ear, from crown to chin, and from eyeball to cerebellum, is not
+the whole universe concentrated in that head of yours?  Are you
+not to yourself in that hour of torture the most vitally
+important of created beings?  And no one blames you for it.  Let
+me therefore be without blame in my hour of moral toothache.
+
+In the days gone by I was the victim of a singular hallucination.
+I flattered myself on being the one individual in the world not
+summoned to play his part in the comedy of Life.  I sat alone in
+the great auditorium like the mad king of Bavaria, watching with
+little zest what seemed but a sorry spectacle.  I thought myself
+secure in my solitary stall.  But I had not counted on the high
+gods who crowd shadowy into the silent seats and are jealous of a
+mortal in their midst.  Without warning was I wrested from my
+place, hurled onto the stage, and before my dazzled eyes could
+accustom themselves to the footlights, I found myself enmeshed
+in intolerable drama.  I was unprepared.  I knew my part
+imperfectly.  I missed my cues.  I had the blighting
+self-consciousness of the amateur.  And yet the idiot mummery was
+intensely real.  Amid the laughter of the silent shadowy gods I
+thought to flee from the stage.  I came to Verona and find I am
+still acting my part.  I have always been acting.  I have been
+acting since I was born.  The reason of our being is to amuse the
+high gods with our histrionics.  The earth itself is the stage,
+and the starry ether the infinite auditorium.
+
+The high gods have granted to their troupe of mimes one boon.
+Each has it in his power to make the final exit at any moment.
+For myself I feel that moment is at hand.  One last soliloquy,
+and then like the pagliacco I can say with a sigh, _"La commedia
+e finita_--the play is played out," and the rest will be silence.
+At all events I will tell my own story.  My "History of
+Renaissance Morals" can lie in its corner and rot, whilst I shall
+concern myself with a far more vital theme--The Morals of Marcus
+Ordeyne.  The rough entries in my diary have been a habit of many
+futile years; but they have never sufficed for self-expression.
+I have not needed it till now.  But now, with Judith and Carlotta
+gone from me, my one friend, Pasquale, cut for ever from my life,
+even the sympathetic Polyphemus driven into eternity by my
+murderous hand, I feel the irresistible craving to express myself
+fully and finally for the first and last time of my life.  It
+will be my swan song.  What becomes of it afterwards I care not.
+
+And when the last word is written, I shall go to the Pinacoteca
+and stand again before the Morone fresco, and if the _Miseratrix
+Virginum Regina_ still simpers at me, I shall take it as a sign
+and a token.  I shall return to this marble cavern and make my
+final exit.  It will be theatrically artistic--that I vow and
+declare--which no doubt will afford immense pleasure to the high
+gods in their gallery.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+It is some two years since I stood for the second time in the
+Pinacoteca of Verona and sought to read my fate in the simpering
+countenance of Morone's _Miseratrix Virginum Regina_.  I met what
+might have been expected by a person of any sense--the self-same
+expression on the painted face as I had angrily found there two
+months before when I began to write the foregoing pages.  But as
+I had no sense at all in those days I accepted the poor battered
+Madonna's lack of sympathy for a sign and a token, went home, and
+prepared for dissolution.
+
+Two years ago!  It is only for the last few months that I have
+been able to look back on that nightmare of a time in Verona with
+philosophic equanimity.  And this morning is the first occasion
+on which I have felt that dispassionate attitude towards a past
+self which enables a man to set down without the heartache the
+memories of days that are gone.  I sit upon the flat roof of this
+house in Mogador on the Morocco coast, shaded by an awning from
+the bright African sun which glints in myriad sparkles on the sea
+visible beyond the house-tops.  The atmosphere last night was
+somewhat heavy with the languorous, indescribable, and
+unforgettable smell of the East; but the morning is deliciously
+wind-swept by the Atlantic breeze, and the air tastes sweet.  And
+it is clear, dazzlingly clear.  The white square houses and the
+cupolas of the mosques stand out sharp against a sky of intense,
+ungradated blue.  I am away from the centre of the busy sea-port
+and the noise of its streets thronged with grain-laden camels and
+shouting drivers and picturesque, quarrelling, squabbling,
+haggling Moors and Jews and desert Arabs, and I am enveloped in
+the peace of the infinite azure.  Besides, yesterday afternoon,
+as I rode back to Mogador, across the tongue of desert which
+separates it from the Palm Tree House, and the town rose on the
+horizon, a dream city of pure snow set in the clear sunset
+amethyst against the still, pale lapis lazuli of the bay
+--something happened.  And yesterday evening more happened still.
+
+
+Two years ago, then, I faced in Verona the dissolution of my
+ineffectual existence.  I could see no reason for living.  My
+theory of myself in my relation to the cosmos had been upset by
+practical phenomena.  No other theory based on surer grounds
+presented itself.  But what about life, said I, without a theory?
+Already it was life without a purpose, without work, without
+friends, without Judith and without Carlotta.  I could not endure
+it without even a theory to console me.  Beings do exist devoid
+of loves or theories.  But of such, I thought, are the beasts
+that perish.  I reflected further.  Supposing, on extended
+investigation, I found a new theory.  How far would it profit me?
+How far could I trust it not to lead me through another series of
+fantastic emotions and futile endeavours to the sublime climax of
+murdering a one-eyed cat?  Self-abomination and contempt smote me
+as I thought of poor Polyphemus stretched dead on the hearthrug,
+and myself standing over him, sane, stupid, and remorseful, with
+the poker in my hand.
+
+I walked up and down the vast cold room of the marble palazzo,
+arraying before me in overwhelming numbers the arguments for
+selfdestruction.  On a table in the middle of the room stood a
+phial of prussic acid which I had procured long before in London,
+it being a conviction of mine that every man ought to have ready
+to hand a sure means of exit from the world.  I paused many times
+in front of the little blue phial.  One lift of the hand, one
+toss of the head, and all would be over.  At last I extracted the
+cork, and the faint smell of almonds reached my nostrils.  I
+recorked the phial and lit a cigarette.  This I threw away half
+smoked and again approached the table of death.  I began to feel
+a strong natural disinclination to swallow the stuff.  "This,"
+said I, "is sheer animal cowardice."  I again uncorked the phial.
+A new phase of the matter appeared to me.  "It is the act of a
+craven to shirk the responsibilities of life.  Can you be such a
+meanspirited creature as not even to have the courage to live?"
+"No," said I, "I have a valiant spirit," and I set down the
+bottle.  "Bah," whispered the familiar imp of suicide at my
+elbow.  "You are just afraid to die."  I took up the bottle
+again.  But the other taunter had an argument equally strong, and
+once more I put the phial uncorked on the table.
+
+Thus between two cowardices, one of which I must choose, stood I,
+like the ass of Buridan.  I lit another cigarette and excogitated
+the problem.  I smoked two cigarettes, walking up and down that
+vast, chill apartment, while the air grew sickly sweet with the
+smell of almonds, which intensified the physical repugnance the
+first faint odour had occasioned.  I began to shiver with cold.
+The stove had burned out before I entered, and I had not
+considered it worth while to have it filled for the few minutes
+that would remain to me to live.  I had not reckoned on the ass's
+bundles of cowardice.
+
+"I may as well be warm," thought I, "while I prove to my complete
+satisfaction that it is more cowardly to live than to die.  There
+is no very great hurry."
+
+I caught up a travelling-rug with which I had tried to soften the
+asperities of an imitation Louis XV couch, and throwing it over
+my shoulders, resumed my pilgrimage.  I soon lost myself in the
+problem and did not notice a corner of the rug gradually slipping
+down towards the floor.
+
+"I'll do it!" I cried at last, making a sudden dive towards the
+table.  But the ironical corner of the rug had reached the
+ground.  I stepped on it, tripped, and instinctively caught the
+table to steady myself.  The table, a rickety gueridon,
+overbalanced, and away rolled my uncorked phial of prussic acid
+and fell into a hundred pieces on the tessellated floor.
+
+"_Solvitur_," said I, grimly, "_ambulando_."
+
+Looking back now, I am inclined to treat myself tenderly.
+Whether I should have drunk the poison, if the accident had not
+occurred, I cannot say.  At the moment of my rush I intended to
+do so.  After the catastrophe, which I attributed to the curse of
+ineffectuality that pursued me, I must confess that I was glad.
+Not that life looked more attractive than before, but that the
+decision had been taken out of my hands.  I could not go about
+the shops of Verona buying prussic acid or revolvers or metres of
+stout rope.  And my razors (without Stenson's care) were
+benignantly blunt, and I would not condescend to braces.  I
+groaned and pished and pshawed, but as it was written that I was
+to live, I resigned myself to a barren and theoryless existence.
+
+After a day or two the vital instinct asserted itself more
+strongly.  I became inspired by an illuminating revelation.  I
+had a preliminary aim in life.  I would go out into the world in
+search of a theory.  When found I would apply it to the
+regulation of the score and a half years during which I might
+possibly expect to remain on this planet.  I must take my chances
+of it leading me to the corpse of another Polyphemus.
+
+As it struck me I should not find my theory in Italy, I packed up
+my belongings and hastened from Verona.  At Naples I picked up a
+Messageries Maritimes steamer and began a circular tour in the
+Levant.  At Alexandretta I went ashore, and inquired my way to
+the dwelling of the Prefect of Police.  I did not call on Hamdi
+Effendi.  But I wandered round the walls and wondered in a moody,
+heart-achey way where it was that Carlotta sat when Harry came
+along and whistled her like a tame falcon to his arm.  It was a
+white palace of a house with a closed balcony supported on rude
+corbels and tightly shuttered.  At the back spread a large garden
+surrounded by the famous wall.  There was no doubt that Hamdi was
+a wealthy personage, and that Carlotta's nurture had been as
+gentle as that of any lady in Syria.  But the place wherein
+Carlotta's childhood had been sheltered had an air of
+impenetrable mystery.  I stood baffled before it, as I had stood
+so often before Carlotta's soul.  The result of this portion of
+my search was the discovery, not of a new theory, but of an old
+pain.  I went back to the ship in a despondent mood, and caused
+deep distress to one of the gentlest creatures I have ever met.
+He was a lean, elderly German, who no matter what the occasion or
+what the temperature wore a long, tight-buttoned frock-coat, a
+narrow black tie, and a little bluish-grey felt hat adorned with
+a partridge's feather which gave him an air of forlorn
+rakishness.  His name was Doctor Anastasius Dose, and he spent a
+blameless life in travelling up and down the world, on behalf of
+a Leipsic firm of which he was a member, in search of rare and
+curious books.  For there are copies of books which have a well-
+known pedigree like famous jewels, and whose acquisition, a
+matter of infinite tact, gives rise, I was told by Herr Dose, to
+the most exquisite thrill known to man.  He brought me on that
+morose afternoon a copy of the "Synonima," in Italian and French,
+of St. Fliscus, printed by Simon Magniagus of Milan in 1480, and
+opened the vellum covers with careful fingers.
+
+"In all the assemblage of human atoms that inhabit this vessel,"
+said he, "there is but one who is imbued with reverence for the
+past and a sense of the preciousness of the unique.  I need not
+tell you, Herr Baronet, who are a scholar, that of this book only
+two copies exist in this ink-sodden universe.  One is in the
+University Library of Bologna; the other is before your eyes.  It
+is also the only book known to have been printed by Magniagus.
+See the beautiful, small Roman type--a masterpiece.  Ach, Herr
+Baronet! to have accomplished one such work in a lifetime, and
+then to sit among the blessed saints and look down on earth and
+know that the two sole copies in existence are cherished by the
+elect, what a reward, what eternal happiness!"
+
+I turned over the pages.  The faint perfume of mouldy lore
+ascended and I remembered the smell of the "Histoire des
+Uscoques" in the Embankment Gardens.
+
+"The _odor di femina_ in the nostrils of the scholar," said I.
+
+"_Famina?_  Woman?" he cried, scandalised.
+
+"Yes, my friend," said I.  "All things sublunar can be translated
+into terms of woman.  St. Fliscus wrote because he hadn't a wife;
+Simon Magniagus stopped printing because he got married and
+devoted his existence to reproducing himself instead of St.
+Fliscus."
+
+"Ach, that is very interesting," said he.  "Could you tell me the
+date of Magniagus's marriage?"
+
+"I never heard of him till this moment, my dear Herr Doctor.  But
+depend upon it, he was either married or was going to be married,
+and she ran away from him and left him without the heart to print
+for posterity, and when he took his seat among the saints she
+said she was so glad; he was a stupid old ink-sodden fellow!"
+
+He departed sorrowingly from the deck, clasping the precious
+volume to his heart.  Allusive or discursive speech scared him
+like indecency; and I had used his gem but as a peg whereon
+flauntingly to hang it.  It took me three days to tame him and to
+induce him to show me another of his treasures, recently acquired
+in Athens.  Ioannes Georgius Godelmann's _Tractate de Lamiis_,
+printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt.  I read him Keats's
+poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never heard.
+His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old
+diplomatist towards a child's woolly lamb.  For him literature
+had never existed and printing ended in the year 1600.  But I was
+sorry when he left me at Constantinople, where he counted on
+striking the track of a Bohemian herbal, printed at Prague, and
+never more to be read by any of the sons of man.  In the summer
+he was going book-hunting in Iceland.  By chance I have learned
+since that he died there.  Peace to his ashes!  For aught I could
+see he dwelt in a mild stupor of happiness, absorbed in the
+intoxication of a tremulous pursuit.  I wondered whether his soul
+contained that antidote--the _odor di femina_.  Perhaps he met it
+at Reykjavic and he died of dismay.
+
+I thought that my landing at Alexandretta was alone responsible
+for the continuance of my dotage, and hoped that fresh scenes
+would banish Carlotta's distracting image.  But no, it was one of
+the many vain reflections on which I based a false philosophy.
+Whether in Beyrout, or the land of the "sweet singer of
+Persephone," or Alexandria, or on the Cannebiere of Marseilles,
+or in the queer half-Orient of Algiers whither a restless pursuit
+of the Identical led me, or in Lisbon, or in the mountainous
+republic of Andorre, where I hoped to find primitive wisdom and
+to shape a theory from first principles, and whence I was
+ironically driven by fleas--whether on land or sea, in cities or
+in solitudes, the vanished hand harped on my heartstrings and
+the voice that was still (as far as I was concerned) cooed its
+dove-notes into my ears.
+
+I remember overhearing myself described on a steamboat by a
+pretty American girl of sixteen, as "a quaint gentle old guy who
+talks awful rot which no one can understand, and is all the time
+thinking about something else."  My sudden emergence from the
+companion-way, where I was lighting a cigarette, brought red
+confusion into the young person's cheeks.
+
+"How old do you think I am?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, about sixty," quoth the damsel.
+
+"I'm glad I'm quaint and gentle, even though I do talk rot," said
+I.
+
+With the resourcefulness of her nation she linked her arm in mine
+and started a confidential walk up and down the deck.
+
+"You are just a dear," she remarked.
+
+She could not have said more to Anastasius Dose had he been
+there; as far as I can recollect he must just then have been
+dying of the Inevitable in Iceland.  Perhaps the few months had
+brought me to resemble him.  Instinctively I put my hand to my
+head to reassure myself that I was not wearing a rakish little
+soft felt hat with a partridge-feather, and I reflected with some
+complacency that my rimless pince-nez did not give me the owlish
+appearance produced by Anastasius Dose's great round, iron-rimmed
+goggles.  From such crumbs of vanity are we sometimes reduced to
+take comfort.
+
+"I just want to know what you are," said my young American friend.
+
+Shall I confess my attraction?  She brought a dim suggestion of
+Carlotta.  She had Carlotta's colouring and Carlotta's candour.
+But there the resemblance stopped.  The grey matter of her brain
+had been distilled from the air of Wall Street, and there were
+precious few things between earth and sky of which she hadn't
+prescience.
+
+"I'm a broken-down philosopher," said I.
+
+" Oh, that's nothing.  So is everybody as soon as they get sense.
+What did you make your money in?"
+
+"I've not made any money," I answered, meekly.
+
+"I thought all people who were knighted in your country had made
+piles of money."
+
+"Knighted!" I exclaimed.  "What on earth do you think a quaint
+old guy like myself could possibly have done to get knighted?"
+
+"Then you're a baronet," she said, severely.
+
+"I assure you it is not my fault."
+
+"I thought all baronets were wicked.  They are in the novels.
+Somehow you don't look like a baronet.  You ought to have a black
+moustache and an eyeglass and smoke a cigar and sneer.  But, say,
+how do you fill up the time if you do nothing to make money?"
+
+"I am going through the world," said I, "on an adventurous quest,
+like a knight--or a baronet, if you will--of the Round Table.  I
+am in quest of a Theory of Life."
+
+"I guess I was born with it," cried young New York.
+
+"I guess I'll die without finding it," said I.
+
+
+London again.  My quiet house.  Antoinette and Stenson.  The
+well-ordered routine of comfort.  My books.  The dog's-eared
+manuscript of the "History of Renaissance Morals," unpacked by
+Stenson and hid in its usual place on the writing-table.  Nothing
+changed, yet everything utterly different.
+
+A growing distaste for the forced acquaintanceships of travel and
+a craving for home brought me back.  Save perhaps in health I had
+profited little by my journeyings.  My bodily shell formed part
+of strange landscapes and occurred in fortuitous gatherings of
+men, but my heart was all the time in my Mausoleum by the
+Regent's Park.  I was drawn thither by a force almost magnetic,
+irresistible.  My two domestics welcomed me home, but no one
+else.  Only my lawyers knew of my arrival.  With them alone had I
+corresponded during the many months of my absence.  Stay; I did
+write one letter to Mrs. McMurray while I was at Verona, in reply
+to an enquiry as to what had become of Carlotta and myself.  I
+answered courteously but briefly that Carlotta had run away with
+Pasquale and that I should be abroad for an indefinite period.
+But not even a letter from my lawyers awaited me.  I thought
+somewhat wistfully that I would willingly have paid six and eight
+pence for it.  But the feeling was momentary.
+
+Then began a queer, untroubled life.  Without definite resolve I
+became a recluse, living forlornly from day to day.  Like a bat I
+avoided the outer sunshine and took my melancholy walks at night.
+I had a pride in cherishing the habit of solitude.  Were it not
+that I entertained a real dislike of roots and water and the damp
+and manifold discomforts of a cave, with which form of habitat
+the ministrations of Stenson and Antoinette would have been
+inconsistent, I should have gone forth into the nearest approach
+to a Thebaid I could discover.  I was, in fact, touched by the
+mild mania of the hermit.  My club I never entered.  A line drawn
+from east to west, a tangent at the lowest point of the
+Zoological Gardens formed the southern boundary of my wanderings.
+Once I spied in the distance that very kind soul, Mrs. McMurray,
+and rushed into a providential omnibus, so as to avoid
+recognition.  My History remained untouched.  The glamour
+of theRenaissance had vanished.  For occupation I read the
+Neo-Platonists, Thaumaturgy, Demonology and the like, which I had
+always found a fascinating although futile study.  I regretted my
+bowing acquaintance with modern science, which forbade my setting
+up a laboratory with alembics and magic crystals wherewith to
+conduct experiments for the finding of the Elixir Vitae and the
+Philosopher's Stone.
+
+I seldom read the newspapers.  I had an idea, like an eminent
+personage of the period, that a sort of war was going on, but it
+failed to interest me greatly.  I shrank from the noise of it.
+
+"Monsieur," said Antoinette, "will get ill if he does not go out
+into the sunshine."
+
+"Monsieur," said I, "regards the sunshine as an impertinent
+intrusion into a soul that loves the twilight."
+
+If I had made the same remark to an Englishwoman, she would have
+pitied me for a poor, half-witted gentleman.  But Antoinette has
+her nation's instinctive appreciation of soul-states, and her
+sympathy was none the less comprehending when she shook her head
+mournfully and said that it was bad for the stomach.
+
+"My good Antoinette," I remarked, harking back in my mind to a
+speculation of other days, "if you go on worrying me in this
+manner about my stomach, I will build a tower forty feet high in
+the back garden, and live on top, and have my meals sent up by a
+lift, and never come down again."
+
+"Monsieur might as well be in Paradise," said Antoinette.
+
+"Ah," said I.  And I thought of the bottle of prussic acid with
+mingled sentiments.
+
+All through these many months I had Judith dwelling, a pale
+ghost, in the back of my mind.  We had parted so finally that
+correspondence between us had seemed impertinent.  But although I
+had not written to her, no small part of the infinite sadness
+that had fallen upon my life was the shadow of her destiny.
+Sweet, wine-loving Judith!  How many times did I picture her
+sitting pinched and wistful in the little tin mission church at
+Hoxton!  Had I, Marcus Ordeyne, condemned her to that
+penitentiary?  Who can hold the balance of morals so truly as to
+decide?
+
+At last I received a letter from her on the anniversary of our
+parting.  She had found salvation in a strange thing which she
+called duty.  "I am fulfilling an appointed task," she wrote,
+"and the measure of my success is the measure of my happiness.  I
+am bringing consolation to a wayward and tormented spirit.  A
+year has swept aside the petty feminine vanities, the opera-
+glasses, so to speak, through which a woman complacently views
+her influence over a man, and it has cleared my vision.  A year
+has proved beyond mortal question that without me this wayward
+and tormented spirit would fail.  I hold in my hands the very
+soul of a man.  What more dare a woman ask of the high gods?  You
+see I use your metaphors still.  Dearest of all dear friends, do
+not pity me.  Beyond all the fires of love through which one
+passes there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who
+can live in its serenity,"
+
+This was astonishingly like the Theory of Life which I set out
+from Verona to seek, and which had hitherto eluded me.  It was
+not very new, or subtle, or inspiring.  But that is the way of
+things.  No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may
+travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+I answered Judith's letter.  After the long silence it seemed, at
+first, strange to write to her; but soon I found myself opening
+my heart as I had never done before to man or woman.  The fact
+that, accident aside, we were never to meet again, drew the
+spiritual elements in us nearer together, and the tone of her
+letter loosened the bonds of my natural reserve.  I told her of
+my past year of life, of the locked memorial chamber upstairs, of
+the madness through which I had passed, of my weary pursuit of
+the Theory, and of my attitude towards her solution of the
+problem.  Having written the letter I felt comforted, knowing
+that Judith would understand.
+
+I finished it about six o'clock one afternoon, and shrinking from
+giving it to Stenson to post, as it was the first private letter
+I had written since my arrival in London, I took it myself to the
+pillar-box.  The fresh air reproached me for the unreasonable
+indoor life I had been leading, and invited me to remain outside.
+It was already dark.  An early touch of frost in the November air
+rendered it exhilarating.  I walked along the decorous,
+residential roads of St. John's Wood feeling less remote from my
+kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in progress behind
+the rows of lighted windows.  Now and then a garden gate opened
+and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of
+satin and frills and fur, emerged, stood for a moment in the
+shaft of light cast by the open hall-door beyond, which framed
+the white-capped and aproned parlour-maid, and entering a waiting
+hansom, drove off into the darkness whither my speculative fancy
+followed them.  Now and then silhouettes appeared upon the
+window-blinds, especially on the upper floors, for it was the
+dressing hour and the cares of the day were being thrown aside
+with the workaday garments.  In one house, standing far back from
+the road, the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn.  As I
+passed, I saw a man tossing up a delighted child in his arms, and
+the mother standing by. _Ay de mi!_  A commonplace of ten
+thousand homes, when the man returns from his toil.  Yet it moved
+me.  To earn one's bread; to perpetuate one's species; to create
+duties and responsibilities; to meet them like a brave man; to
+put the new generation upon the right path; to look back upon it
+all and say, "I have fulfilled my functions," and pass forth
+quietly into the eternal laboratory--is not that Life in its
+truth and its essence?  And the reward?  The commonplace.  The
+welcome of wife and children--and the tossing of a crowing babe
+in one's arms.  And I had missed it all, lived outside it all.  I
+had spoken blasphemously in my besotted ignorance of these sacred
+common things, and verily I had my recompense in a desolate home
+and a life of about as much use to humanity as that of St. Simeon
+Stylites on top of his pillar.
+
+So I walked along the streets on the track of the wisdom which
+Judith had revealed to me, and I seemed to be on the point of
+reaching it when I arrived at my own door.
+
+"But what the deuce shall I do with it when I get it?" I said, as
+I let myself in with my latch-key.
+
+I had just put my stick in the stand and was taking off my
+overcoat, when the door of the room next the diningroom opened,
+and Antoinette rushed out upon me.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur!" she cried, wringing her hands.  "Oh,
+Monsieur!  How shall I tell you?"
+
+The good soul broke into sobbing and weeping.
+
+"What is the matter, Antoinette?" Z asked.
+
+"Monsieur must not be angry.  Monsieur is good like the Bon Dieu.
+But it will give pain to Monsieur."
+
+"But what is it?" I cried, mystified.  "Have you spoiled the
+dinner?"
+
+I was a million miles from any anticipation of her answer.
+
+_"Monsieur-she has come back!"_
+
+I grew faint for a moment as from a blow over the heart.
+Antoinette raised her great tear-stained face.
+
+"Monsieur must not drive her away."
+
+I pushed her gently aside and entered the little room which I had
+furnished once as her boudoir.
+
+On the couch sat Carlotta, white and pinched and poorly clad.  At
+first I was only conscious of her great brown eyes fixed upon me,
+the dog-like appeal of our first meeting intensified to
+heart-breaking piteousness.  On seeing me she did not rise, but
+cowered as if I would strike her.  I looked at her, unable to
+speak.   Antoinette stood sobbing in the doorway.
+
+"Well?" said I, at last.
+
+"I have come home," said Carlotta.
+
+"You have been away a long time," said I.
+
+"Ye-es," said Carlotta.
+
+"Why have you come?" I asked.
+
+"I had no money," said Carlotta, with her expressive gesture of
+upturned palms.  "I had nothing but that."  She pointed to a tiny
+travelling bag.  "Everything else was at the Mont de Piete--the
+pawnshop--and they would not keep me any longer at the pension.
+I owed them for three weeks, and then they lent me money to buy
+my ticket to London.  I said Seer Marcous would pay them back.
+So I came home."
+
+"But where--where is Pasquale?" I asked.
+
+"He went five, six months ago.  He gave me some money and said he
+would send some more.  But he did not send any.  He went to South
+Africa.  He said there was a war and he wanted to fight, and he
+said he was sick of me.  Oh, he was very unkind," she cried with
+the quiver of her baby lips.  "I wish I had never seen him."
+
+"Are you married?"
+
+"No," said Carlotta.
+
+"Damn him!" said I, between my teeth.
+
+"He was going to marry me, but then he said it did not matter in
+Paris.  At first he was so nice, but after a little--oh, Seer
+Marcous dear, he was so cruel."
+
+There was a short silence.  Antoinette wept by the door, uttering
+little half-audible exclamations _"la pauvre petite, le cher
+ange!"_
+
+Carlotta regarded me wistfully.  I saw a new look of suffering in
+her eyes.  For myself I felt numb with pain.
+
+"What kind of a pension were you living in?" I asked, unutterable
+horrors coming into my head.
+
+"It was a French family, an old lady and two old daughters, and
+one fat German professor.  Pasquale put me there.  It was very
+respectable," she added, with a wan smile, "and so dull.  Madame
+Champet would scarcely let me go into the street by myself."
+
+"Thank heaven you did not fall into worse hands," said I.
+
+Carlotta unpinned her old straw hat, quite a different garment
+from the dainty head-wear she delighted in a year before, and
+threw it on the couch beside her.  A tress of her glorious bronze
+hair fell loose across her forehead, adding to the woebegone
+expression of her face.  She rose, and as she did so I seemed to
+notice a curious change in her.  She came to me with extended
+hands.
+
+"Seer Marcous--" she whispered.
+
+I took her hands in mine.
+
+"Oh, my dear," said I, "why did you leave me?"
+
+"I was wicked.  And I was a little fool," said Carlotta.
+
+I sighed, released her, walked a bit apart.  There was a blubber
+from the egregious old woman in the threshold.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur is not going to drive her away."
+
+I turned upon her.
+
+"Instead of standing there weeping like a fountain and doing
+nothing, why aren't you getting Mademoiselle's room ready for
+her?"
+
+"Because Monsieur has the key," wailed Antoinette.
+
+"That's true," said I.
+
+Then I reflected on the futility of converting bedchambers into
+mausoleums for the living.  The room shut up for a year would not
+be habitable.  It would be damp and inch-deep in dust.
+
+"Mademoiselle shall sleep in my room to-night," I said, "and
+Stenson can make me up a bed and put what I want here.  Go and
+arrange it with him."
+
+Antoinette departed.  I turned to Carlotta.
+
+"Are you very tired, my child?"
+
+"Oh, yes--so tired."
+
+"Why didn't you write, so that things could have been got ready
+for you?"
+
+"I don't know.  I was too unhappy.  Seer "Marcous--" she said
+after a little pause and then stopped.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I am going to have a baby."
+
+She said it in the old, childlike way, oblivious of difference of
+sex; with her little foreign insistence on the final consonants.
+I glanced hurriedly at her.  The fact was obvious.  She stood
+with her hands helplessly outspread.  The pathos of her would
+have wrung the heart of a devil.
+
+"Thank God, you've come home," said I, huskily.
+
+She began to cry softly.  I put my arm round her shoulders, and
+comforted her.  She sobbed out incoherent things.  She wished she
+had never seen Pasquale.  I was good.  She would stay with me
+always.  She would never run away again.
+
+I took her upstairs, and opened the door of her room with the key
+that I had carried for a year on my bunch, and turned on the
+electric light.
+
+"See what are still usable of your old things," said I, "and I
+will send Antoinette up to you."
+
+She looked around her, somewhat puzzled.
+
+"Why should I sleep in your room when this one is ready for me--
+my night dress--even the hot water?"
+
+"My dear," said I, "that hot water was put for you a year ago.
+It must be cold now."
+
+"And my red slippers--and my dressing-gown!" she cried,
+quaveringly.
+
+Then sinking in a heap on the floor beside the dusty bed, she
+burst into a passion of tears.
+
+I stole away and sent Antoinette to minister to her.
+
+A year before I had raved and ranted, deeming life intolerable
+and cursing the high gods; I suffered then, it is true; but I
+hope I may never again go through the suffering of that first
+night of Carlotta's return.  Even now I can close my eyes and
+feel the icy grip on my heart.
+
+She came down to dinner about an hour later, dressed in a pink
+wrapper, one of the last things she had bought, which Antoinette
+(as she explained to excuse her delay) had been airing before the
+fire.  She sat opposite me, in her old place, penitent, subdued,
+yet not shy or ill at ease.  Stenson waited on us, grave and
+imperturbable as if we had put back the clock of time a
+twelvemonth.  The only covert reference he made to the event was
+to murmur discreetly in my ear:
+
+"I have brought up a bottle of the Pommery, Sir Marcus, in the
+hope you would drink some."
+
+I was touched, for the good fellow had no other way of showing
+his solicitude.
+
+Carlotta allowed him to fill her glass.  She sipped the wine, and
+declared that it did her good.  She was no longer a teetotaller,
+she explained.  Once she drank too much, and the next day had a
+headache.
+
+"Why should one have a headache?"
+
+"Nemesis," said I.
+
+"What is Nemesis?"
+
+I found myself answering her question in the old half-jesting
+way.  And in her old way she replied:
+
+"I do not understand."
+
+How vividly familiar it was, and yet how agonisingly strange!
+
+"Where is Polyphemus?" she asked.
+
+"Dead," said I.
+
+"Oh-h!  How did poor Polyphemus die?"
+
+"He was smitten by Destiny at the end of the last act of a
+farcical tragedy."
+
+The ghost of a "_hou!_" came from Carlotta.  She composed herself
+immediately.
+
+"I often used to think of Polyphemus and Seer Marcous and
+Antoinette," she said, musingly.  "And then I wished I was back.
+I have been very wicked."
+
+She put her elbows on the table, and framing her face with her
+hands looked at me, and shook her head.
+
+"Oh, you are good!  Oh, you are good!"
+
+"Go on with your dinner, my child," said I, "and wonder at the
+genius of Antoinette who has managed to cook it and look after
+you at the same time."
+
+She obeyed meekly.  I watched her eat.  She was famished.  I
+learned that she had had nothing since the early morning coffee
+and roll.  In spite of pain, I was curiously flattered by her
+return.  I represented _something_ to her, after all--even though
+the instinct of the prodigal cat had driven her hither.  I am
+sure it had never crossed her mind that my doors might be shut
+against her.  Her first words were, "I have come home."  The
+first thing she did when we went into the drawing-room after
+dinner was to fondle my hand and lay it against her cheek and
+say, with a deep sigh:
+
+"I am so happy."
+
+However shallow her butterfly nature was, these things came from
+its depths.  No man can help feeling pleased at a child's or an
+animal's implicit trust in him.  And the pleasure is of the
+purest.  He feels that unreasoning intuition has penetrated to
+some latent germ of good in his nature, and for the moment he is
+disarmed of evil.  Carlotta, then, came blindly to what was best
+in me.  In her thoughts she sandwiched me between the cat and the
+cook: well, in most sandwiches the mid-ingredient is the most
+essential.
+
+She curled herself up in the familiar sofa-corner, and as it was
+a chilly night I sent for a wrap which I threw over her limbs.
+
+"See, I have the dear red slippers," she remarked, arching her
+instep.
+
+"And I have my dear Carlotta," said I.
+
+I drew my chair near her, and gradually I learned all the unhappy
+story.
+
+Pasquale had made love to her from the very first minute of their
+acquaintance--even while I was hunting for the _L'Histoire
+Comique de Francion_.  He had met her many times unknown to me.
+They had corresponded, her letters being addressed to a little
+stationer's shop close by.  She did not love him.  Of that I have
+an absolute conviction.  But he was young, he was handsome, he
+had the libertine's air and manner.  She was docile.  And she was
+ever positively truthful.  If I had questioned her she would have
+confessed frankly.  But I never questioned, as I never suspected.
+I wondered sometimes at her readiness in quoting him.  I noticed
+odd coincidences; but I was too ineffectual to draw inferences
+from phenomena.  His appearance on the Paddington platform was
+prearranged; his duchessa at Ealing a myth.
+
+Apparently he had dallied with his fancy.  The fruit was his any
+day for the plucking.  Perhaps a rudimentary sentiment of loyalty
+towards me restrained him.  Who can tell?  The night of our
+meeting with Hamdi brought the crisis.  The Turk's threats had
+alarmed both Carlotta and myself.  It was necessary for him to
+strike at once.  He saw her the next day--would to heaven I had
+remained at home!--told her I was marrying her to save her from
+Hamdi.  I loved the other woman.  He would save her equally well
+from Hamdi.  The other woman met her soon after parting from
+Pasquale and besought her to give me up.  She did not know what
+to do.  Poor child, how should she have known?  On the previous
+evening I had told her she was to marry me.  She was ready to
+obey.  She went to bed thinking that she was to marry me.  In the
+morning she went for her music lesson.  Pasquale was waiting for
+her.  They walked for some distance down the road.  He hailed a
+cab and drove away with her.
+
+"He said he loved me," said Carlotta, "and he kissed me, and he
+told me I must go away with him to Paris and marry him.  And I
+felt all weak, like that--" she dropped her arms helplessly in an
+expressive gesture, "and so what could I do?"
+
+"Didn't you think, Carlotta, that I might be sorry--perhaps
+unhappy?" I asked as gently as I could.
+
+"He said you would be quite happy with the other woman."
+
+"Did you believe him?"
+
+"That's why I said I have been very wicked," Carlotta answered,
+simply.
+
+She went on with her story--an old, miserable, detestable,
+execrable story.  At first all went merrily.  Then she fell ill
+in Paris.  It was her first acquaintance with the northern
+winter.  Her throat proved to be delicate and she was laid up
+with bronchitis.  To men of Pasquale's type, a woman ill is of no
+more use than a spavined horse or a broken-down motor-car.  More
+than that, she becomes an infernal nuisance.  It was in his
+temperament to perform sporadic acts of fantastic chivalry.  It
+appealed to something romantic, theatrical, in his facile nature.
+But to devote himself to a woman in sickness--that was different.
+The fifteenth century Italian hated like the devil continued
+association with pain.  He would have thrown his boots to a
+beggar, but he would have danced in his palace over the dungeons
+where his brother rotted in obscurity.
+
+So poor Carlotta was neglected, and began to eat the bread of
+disillusion.  When she got well, there was a faint recrudescence
+of affection.  Has not this story been written a million
+miserable times?  Why should I rend my heart again by retelling
+it?  Wild rages, jealousies, quarrels, tears--
+
+"And then one day he said, 'You damned little fool, I am sick to
+death of you,' and he went away, and I never saw him again.  He
+wrote and he sent his valet to put me in the pension."
+
+"And yet, Carlotta," said I bitterly, "you would go back to him
+if he sent for you?"
+
+She sprang forward and gripped me by the arm--I was sitting quite
+close to her--and her face wore the terror-stricken expression of
+a child frightened with bogies.
+
+"Go back?  After what he has done to me?  You would not send me
+back?  Seer Marcous, darling, you will keep me with you?  I will
+be good, good, good.  But go back to Pasquale?  Oh, no-o-o!"
+
+She fell back in her sofa-corner, and fixed her great, deep
+imploring eyes on me.
+
+"My dear," said I, "you know this is your home as long as ever
+you choose to stay in it--but--" and I stroked her hair gently--"
+if he comes back when your child is born--his child--"
+
+She drew herself up superbly.
+
+"It is my child--my very, very own," cried Carlotta.  "It is
+mine, mine--and I shall not allow any one to touch it--" and then
+her face softened--"except Seer Marcous."
+
+
+
+                         CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+Behold Carlotta again installed in my house which she regarded as
+her home.  Heaven forbid that I should sow any doubt thereof in
+her mind.
+
+I had learned perhaps one lesson: the meaning of love.  The love
+that is desire alone, though sung in all romance of all the ages,
+is of the brute nature and is doomed to perish.  The love that
+pardons, endures through wrong, contents itself in abnegation, is
+of the imperishable things that draw weak man a little nearer to
+the angels.  When Carlotta wept upon my shoulder during those few
+first moments of her return I knew that all resentment was gone
+from my heart, that it would have been a poor, ignoble thing.
+Had she come back to me leprous of body and abominable of spirit,
+it would not have mattered.  I would have forgiven her, loved
+her, cherished her just the same.  It was a question, not of
+reason, not of human pity, not of quixotism; not of any argument
+or sentiment for which I could be responsible.  I was helpless,
+obeying a reflex action of the soul.
+
+The days passed tranquilly.  In spite of pain I felt an odd
+happiness.  I had nothing selfishly to hope for.  Perhaps I had
+aged five years in one, and I viewed life differently.  It was
+enough for me that she had come home, to the haven where no harm
+could befall her.  She was my appointed task, even as her husband
+was Judith's.  I recognised in myself the man with the one
+talent.  The deep wisdom of the parable can be taken to inmost
+heart for comfort only by men of little destinies.  With infinite
+love and patience to mould Carlotta into a sweet, good woman, a
+wise mother of the child that was to be--that was the inglorious
+task which Providence had set me to accomplish.  In its
+proportion to the aggregate of human effort it was infinitesimal.
+But who shall say that it was not worth the doing?  Save writing
+a useless book, in what other sphere of sublunar energy could I
+have been effectual?  I did not thus analyse my attitude at the
+time; the man who does so is a poser, a mime to his own audience;
+but looking back, I think I was guided by some such unformulated
+considerations.
+
+Although my hermit mania was in itself radically cured, yet I
+altered nothing in my relations with the outside world.  I wrote
+to Judith a brief account of what had occurred and received from
+her a sympathetic answer.  My reading among the Mystics and
+Thaumaturgists put me on the track of Arabic.  I found that
+Carlotta knew enough of the language to give me elementary
+instruction, and thus the whirligig of time brought in its
+revenge by constituting me her pupil, to our joint edification.
+
+After a while the unhappiness of the past seemed to have faded
+from her mind.  She spoke little of Paris, less of the dull
+pension, and never of Pasquale.  She bore towards him an animal's
+silent animosity against a human being who has done it an
+unforgettable injury.  On the other hand, as I have since
+discovered, she was slowly developing, and had begun to realise
+that in giving herself light-heartedly to a man whom she did not
+love, she had committed a crime against her sex, for which she
+had paid a heavy penalty: a sentiment, however, which did not
+mitigate her resentment against him.  Often I saw her sitting
+with knitted brows, her needlework idle on her lap, evidently
+unravelling some complicated problem; presently she would either
+shake her head sadly as if the intellectual process were too hard
+for her and resume her needle, or if she happened to catch my
+glance, she would start, smile reassuringly at me, and apply
+herself with exaggerated zeal to her work.  These fits of
+abstraction were not those of a woman speculating on mysteries of
+the near future.  Such Carlotta also indulged in, and they were
+easy to recognise, by the dreaminess of her eyes and the faint
+smile flickering about her lips.  The moods of knitted brows were
+periods of soul-travail, and I wondered what they would bring
+forth.
+
+One afternoon I came home and found her weeping over a book.
+When I bent down to see what she was reading--she had acquired a
+taste for novels during the dull pension time in Paris--she
+caught my head with both hands.
+
+"Oh, Seer Marcous, do you think they ought to make me wear a
+great 'A'?"
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked.
+
+"Like Hester Prynne--see."
+
+She showed me Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter."
+
+"What made you take this out of the shelves?"
+
+"The title," she replied, simply.  "I am so fond of red things;
+but I should not like that great red 'A'."
+
+"Those were days," said I, "when people thought they could only
+be good by being very cruel."
+
+"They would have been more cruel if Hester had not loved the
+minister," said Carlotta, looking at me wistfully.
+
+"My dear little girl," said I, seeing whither her thoughts were
+tending, "do not bother your brain with psychological problems."
+
+"What are--?" began Carlotta.
+
+I pinched the question, as it were, out of her cheek and smiled
+and took away the book.
+
+"They are a dreadful disease my little girl has been afflicted
+with for some time.  When you sit and wrinkle your forehead like
+this," and I scowled forbiddingly, whereat Carlotta laughed, "you
+are suffering from acute psychological problem."
+
+"Then I am thinking," said Carlotta, reflectively.
+
+"Don't think too much, dear, just now," said I.  "It is best for
+you to be happy and calm and contented.  Otherwise I'll have to
+tell the doctor, and he'll give you the blackest and nastiest
+physic you have ever tasted."
+
+"To cure me of a what-you-call-it problem?"
+
+"Yes," said I, emphatically.
+
+"_Hou!_" laughed Carlotta in a superior way, "physic can't cure
+that."
+
+"You are relying on an exploded fallacy immortalised in a
+hackneyed Shakespearian quotation," I remarked.
+
+"Go on," said Carlotta, encouragingly.
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked, taken aback.
+
+"Oh, you darling Seer Marcous," cried Carlotta.  "It is so lovely
+to hear you talk!"
+
+So I went on talking, and the distress occasioned by the "Scarlet
+Letter" was forgotten.
+
+I have mentioned Carlotta's needlework.  This was undertaken at
+the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am
+sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her
+duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson.  Carlotta herself
+delighted in these preparations.  She was never happier than when
+curled up on the sofa, a box of chocolates by her side, her work-
+basket frothing over, like a great dish of _oeufs a la neige_,
+with lawn or mull or what-not, and (I verily believe to complete
+her content) my ungainly figure and hatchet-face within her
+purview.  She would eat and sew industriously.  Sometimes she
+would press too hard on a sweetmeat and with a little cry would
+hold up a sticky finger and thumb.
+
+"Look," she would say, puckering up her face.
+
+And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I
+would rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon
+she would coo out the sweetest "thank you," in the world, and
+perhaps hold up a diminutive garment.
+
+"Isn't it pretty?"
+
+"Yes, my dear," I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at
+the exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called
+upon to bear.
+
+
+At last the time came.  I sat up all night in a torture of
+suspense, having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might
+die.  The doctor came upon me at six in the morning sitting half
+frozen at the bottom of the stairs.  When he gave me his cheery
+news he seemed to develop from a middle-aged, commonplace man
+into a radiant archangel.
+
+I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant.  She
+nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.
+
+"And to think, Monsieur," she exclaimed, as if the crowning
+triumph of a million ions of evolution had at, last been
+attained, "to think that it is a boy!"
+
+"You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl," said
+I.
+
+She shook her wise, fat head.  "Women _ca ne vaut pas grand'
+chose._"
+
+Let it be remembered that "women are of no great account" is a
+sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette.  But all the
+same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the
+triumvirate of the negligible sex, Antoinette, the nurse and
+Carlotta, reigned despotically.
+
+To write much of Carlotta's happiness would be to treat of sacred
+things at which I can only guess.  She dwelt in rapture.  The joy
+and meaning of the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle
+of pink flesh that lay on her bosom.  I used to sit by her side
+while she talked unwearyingly of him.  He was a thing of infinite
+perfections.  He had such a lot of hair.
+
+"She won't believe, sir," said the nurse, "that it will all drop
+off and a new crop come."
+
+"Oh-h!" said Carlotta.  "It can't be so cruel.  For it is my hair
+--see, Seer Marcous, darling; isn't it just my hair?"
+
+It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.
+
+"I don't know about his nose," she remarked critically.  "There
+is so little of it yet and it is so soft--feel how soft it is.
+But his eyes are brown like mine, and his mouth--now look, aren't
+they just the same?"
+
+She put her cheek next to the child's and invited me to compare
+the two adjacent baby mouths.  They were, of a truth, very much
+alike.
+
+She was jealous of the baby, desirous of having it always with
+her to tend and fondle, impatient of the nurse and Antoinette.
+It was a thing so intensely hers that she resented other hands
+touching it.  Oddly enough, of me she made an exception.  Nothing
+delighted her more than to put the little creature into my
+awkward and nervous arms, and watch me carry it about the room.
+I think she wanted to give me something, and this share in the
+babe was the most precious gift she could devise.
+
+Of Pasquale she continued to say nothing.  In her intense joy of
+motherhood he seemed to have become the dim creature of a dream.
+I had registered the birth without consulting her--in the legal
+names of the parents.
+
+"What are you going to call him, Carlotta?" I asked one day.
+
+"_Mon petit chou._  That's what Antoinette says.  It's a
+beautiful name."
+
+"There are many points in calling an infant one's little
+cabbage," I admitted, "but soon he'll grow up to be as old as I
+am, and--" I sighed, "who would call me their _petit chow_?"
+
+Carlotta laughed.
+
+"That is true.  We shall have to find a name."  She reflected for
+a few moments; then put her arms round my neck and continued her
+reflections.
+
+"He shall be Marcus--another Marcus Ordeyne.  Then perhaps some
+day he will be 'Seer Marcous' like you."
+
+"Do you mean when I die?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, not for years and years and years!" she cried, tightening
+her clasp in alarm.  "But the child lives longer than the father.
+It is fate.  He will live longer than I."
+
+"Let us hope so, dear," I answered.  "But it is just because I am
+not his father that he can't be Sir Marcus when I die.  He can
+have my name; but my title--"
+
+"Who will have it?"
+
+"No one."
+
+"It will die too?"
+
+"It will be quite dead."
+
+"You are his father, you know, _really_," she whispered.
+
+"The law of England takes no count, unfortunately, of things of
+the spirit," said I.
+
+"What are things of the spirit?"
+
+"The things, my dear," said I, "that you are beginning to
+understand."  I bent down and kissed the child as it lay on her
+lap.  "Poor little Marcus Ordeyne," I said.  "My poor quaintly
+fathered little son, I'm afraid there is much trouble ahead of
+you, but I'll do my best to help you through it."
+
+"Bless you, dear," said Carlotta, softly.
+
+I looked at her in wonder.  She had spoken for the first time
+like a grown woman--like a woman with a soul.
+
+
+A few weeks later.
+
+We were sitting at breakfast.  The morning newspaper contained
+the account of a battle and the lists of British officers killed.
+I scanned as usual the melancholy columns, when a name among the
+dead caught my eye--and I stared at it stupidly.  Pasquale was
+dead, killed outright by a Boer bullet.  The wild, bright life was
+ended.  It seemed a horrible thing, and, much as he had wronged
+me, my first sentiment was one of dismay.  He was too gallant and
+beautiful a creature for death.
+
+Carlotta poured out my tea and came round with the cup which she
+deposited by my side.  To prevent her peeping over my shoulder at
+the paper, as she usually did, I laid it on the table; but her
+quick eye had already read the great headlines.
+
+"Great Battle.  British officers killed.  Oh, let me see, Seer
+Marcous."
+
+"No, dear," said I.  "Go and eat your breakfast."
+
+She looked at me strangely.  I tried to smile; but as I am an
+incompetent actor my grimace was a proclamation of
+disingenuousness.
+
+"Why shouldn't I read it?" she asked, quickly.
+
+"Because I say you mustn't, Carlotta."
+
+She continued to look at me.  She had suddenly grown pale.  I
+stirred my tea and made a pretence of sipping it.
+
+"Go on with your breakfast, my child," I repeated.
+
+"There is something--something about him in the paper," said
+Carlotta.  "He is a British officer."
+
+In the face of her intuition further concealment appeared
+useless.  Besides, sooner or later she would have to know.
+
+"He is a British officer no longer, dear," said I.
+
+"Is he dead?"
+
+My mind flew back to an evening long ago--long, long ago it
+seemed
+--when another newspaper had told of another death, and my ears
+caught the echo of the identical question that had then fallen
+from her lips.  I dreaded lest she should say again, "I am so
+glad."
+
+I beckoned her to my side, and pointing with my finger to the
+name watched her face anxiously.  She read, stared for a bit in
+front of her and turned to me with a piteous look.  I drew her to
+me, and she laid her face against my shoulder.
+
+"I don't know why I'm crying, Seer Marcous, dear," she said,
+after a while.
+
+I made her drink some of my tea, but she would eat nothing, and
+presently she went upstairs.  She had not said that she was glad.
+She had wept and not known the reason for her tears.  I railed at
+myself for my doubts of her.
+
+She was subdued and thoughtful all the day.  In the evening,
+instead of curling herself up in the sofa-corner among the
+cushions, she sat on a stool by my feet as I read, one hand
+supporting her chin, the other resting on my knee.
+
+"I am glad he was a brave man," she said at last, alluding to
+Pasquale for the first time since the morning.  "I like brave
+men."
+
+"_Dulce et decorum est._  He died for his country," said I.
+
+"It does not hurt me now so much to think of him," said Carlotta.
+
+I could not help feeling a miserable pang of jealousy at
+Pasquale's posthumous rehabilitation as a hero in Carlotta's
+heart.  Yet, was it not natural?  Was it not the way of women?  I
+saw myself far remote from her, and though she never spoke of him
+again I divined that her thoughts dwelt not untenderly on his
+memory.  I was absurd, I know.  But I had begun almost to believe
+in my make-believe paternity, and I was jealous of the rightful
+claims of the dead man.
+
+And yet had he lived he might have come back one day with his
+conquering air and his irresistible laugh, and carried them both
+away from me.  In sparing me this crowning humiliation I thanked
+the high gods.
+
+But never to this day has she mentioned his name again.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+How shall I set down that which happened not long afterwards?
+
+The death of a baby is so commonplace, so unimportant.  Few
+reasoning people, viewing the matter in the abstract, can do
+otherwise than rejoice that a human being is saved from the
+weariness of the tired years that make up life.  For who shall
+disprove the pessimist's assertion that it is better not to have
+been born than to come into the world, and that it is better to
+die than to live?  But those from whom the single hope of their
+existence is ravished find little consolation in reason.  Grief
+is the most intensely egotistical of emotions.  I have lost all
+that makes life beautiful to me.  Is not that enough for the
+stricken soul?
+
+To Carlotta it meant a passage through the valley of the shadow.
+To me, at first, it meant the life of Carlotta, and then a blank
+in my newly ordered scheme of things.  The curse of
+ineffectuality still pursued me.  I had allotted to myself my
+humble task--the development of the new generation in the form of
+Carlotta's boy, and even that small usefulness was I denied by
+Fate.
+
+A chill, a touch of croup, an agonised watching, and the tiny
+thing lay dead.  Antoinette and I had to drag it stone cold from
+Carlotta's bosom.  I alone carried it to burial.  The little
+white coffin rested on the opposite seat of the hired brougham,
+and on it was a bunch of white flowers given by Antoinette.  In
+the cemetery chapel another fragment of humanity awaited
+sepulture, and the funeral service was read over both bodies.  I
+stood alone by the little white coffin.  A crowd of mourners were
+grouped beside the black one.  I glanced at the inscription as I
+passed: "Jane Elliot, in the eighty-sixth year of her age."  The
+officiant referred in the service to "our dear brother and
+sister, here departed."  It was either an awful jest or an awful
+verity.
+
+My "quaintly fathered little son" had small need of my help
+through the troubles of his life.  His mother needed all that I
+could give.  Without me she would have died.  That I verily
+believe.  I was her solitary plank in the welter wherein she
+would have been submerged.  She clung to me--literally clung to
+me.  I sat for hours with her grasp upon me.  To feel assured of
+my physical presence alone seemed to bring her calm.
+
+Recent as are those sleepless days and nights, their memory is
+all confused.  The light burning dimly in the familiar chamber
+which I had once sealed up as a tomb; the shadows on the wall;
+the fevered face and great hollow eyes of Carlotta against the
+pillows; her little hand clutching mine in desperation; the soft
+tread of the nurse, that is all I remember.  And when she
+recovered her wits and grew sane, although for a long time she
+spoke little, and scarcely noticed me otherwise, she claimed me
+by her side.  She was still dazed by the misery of her darkness.
+It was only then that I realised the part the child had played in
+her development.  Her nature had been stirred to the quick; the
+capacity for emotion had been awakened.  She had left me without
+a qualm.  She had given herself to Pasquale without a glimmer of
+passion.  She had returned to me like a wounded animal seeking
+its home.  For the child alone the passionate human love had
+sprung flaming from the seed hidden in her soul.  And now the
+child was dead, and the sun had gone from her sky, and she was
+benumbed with the icy blackness of the world.
+
+Then came a time when her speech was loosened and she talked to
+me incessantly of the child, until one day she spoke of it as
+living and clamoured for it, and relapsed into her fever.
+
+At last one morning she awakened from a sound sleep and found me
+watching; for I had relieved the nurse at six o'clock.  She
+smiled at me for the first time since the child fell sick, and
+took my hand and kissed it.
+
+"It is like waking into heaven to see your face, Seer Marcous,
+darling," she whispered.
+
+"I hope heaven is peopled by a better-looking set of fellows," I
+said.
+
+"_Hou!_" laughed Carlotta.  "Don't you know you are beautiful?"
+
+"You mustn't throw an old jest in my teeth, Carlotta," said I,
+and I reminded her how she had once screamed with laughter when I
+had told her I was very beautiful.
+
+Carlotta listened patiently until I had ended, and then she said,
+with a little sigh:
+
+"You cannot understand, Seer Marcous, darling.  I have been
+thinking of my little baby and the angels--and all the angels are
+like you."
+
+To cover the embarrassment my modesty underwent, I laughed and
+drew the picture of myself with long flaxen hair and white wings.
+
+"My angels hadn't got wings," said Carlotta, seriously.  "They
+all wore dressing-gowns.  They were real angels.  And the one
+that was most like you brought my baby in his arms for me to
+kiss; and when he put it on a white cloud to sleep, and took me
+up in his arms instead and carried me away, away, away through
+the air, I didn't cry at leaving baby.  Wasn't that funny?  I
+snuggled up close to him--like that"--she illustrated the action
+of "snuggling" beneath the bed-clothes--"and it was so comfy."
+
+The pale sunshine of a fine February morning filtered into the
+room from behind the curtains.  I turned off the dimmed electric
+lamp and let full daylight into the room.
+
+"Oh!" cried Carlotta, turning to the window, "how lovely the good
+sun is!  It is more like heaven than ever.  Do you know," she
+added, mysteriously, "just before I woke it was all dark, and I
+had lost my angels and I was looking for them."
+
+I counselled her sagely to look for no more members of the
+Hierarchy _en deshabille_, but to content herself with the
+humbler denizens of this planet.  She pressed my hand.
+
+"I'll try to be contented, Seer Marcous, darling."
+
+She did her best, poor child, when I was by; but I heard that
+often she would sit by a little pile of garments and take them up
+one by one and cry her heart out--so that though she quickly
+recovered, her cheeks remained wan and drawn, and pain lingered
+in her eyes.  The weather changed to fog and damp and she spent
+the days crouching by the fire, sometimes not stirring a muscle
+for an hour together.  Her favourite seat was the fender-stool in
+the drawing-room.  Her own boudoir downstairs, where she used to
+receive instruction from the excellent Miss Griggs, she scarcely
+entered.
+
+She broke one of these fits suddenly and called me by her own pet
+version of my name.  I looked up from the writing-table where I
+was studying the Arabic grammar.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I have been thinking--oh, thinking, thinking so long.  I've been
+thinking that you must love me very much."
+
+"Yes, Carlotta," said I, with a half smile.  "I suppose I do."
+
+"As much as I loved my baby," she said, seriously,
+
+"I used to love you in a different way, perhaps,"
+
+"And now?"
+
+"Perhaps in the same sort of way, Carlotta."
+
+"I loved my baby because it was mine," she remarked, looking at
+the flames through one hand's delicate fingers.  "I wanted to do
+everything for him and didn't want him to do anything for me.  I
+would have died for him.  It is so strange.  Yes, I think you
+must love me like that, Seer Marcous.  Why?"
+
+"Because when I found you in the Embankment Gardens nearly two
+years ago you were about as helpless as your little baby," I
+replied, somewhat disingenuously.
+
+Carlotta gave me a quick glance.
+
+"You thought me then what you call an infernal nuisance.  Oh, I
+know now.  I have grown wise.  But you were always good.  You
+looked good when you sat on the seat.  You were reading a dirty
+little book."
+
+"_L'Histoire des Uscoques,_" I murmured.  How far away it seemed.
+
+There was a pause.  I regarded her for a moment or two.  She was
+sunk again in serious reflection.  I sighed--at the general
+dismalness of life, I suppose--and resumed my Arabic.
+
+"Seer Marcous."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Why didn't you drive me away when I came back?"
+
+I shut up the Arabic grammar and went and sat beside her on the
+fenderstool.
+
+"My dear little girl--what a question!  How could I drive you
+away from your own home?"
+
+She flashed a queer, scared look at me, then at the fire, then at
+me again and then burst out crying, her head and arms on her
+knees.
+
+I muttered a man's words of awkward comfort, saying something
+about the baby.
+
+"It isn't baby I'm crying about," sobbed Carlotta.  "It's me!
+And it's you!  And it's all the things I'm beginning to
+understand."
+
+I patted her head and lit a cigarette and wandered about the
+room, rather puzzled by Carlotta's psychological development, and
+yet stirred by a faint thrill at her recognition of my affection.
+At the same time the sad "too late, too late," was knelled in my
+ears, and I thought of the might-have-been, and rode the merry-
+go-round of regret's banalities.  I had grown old.  Passion had
+died.  Hope--the hope of hearing the patter of a child's feet
+about my house, the hope of pride in a quasi-paternity, of
+handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of life--hope
+was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin.  Only a
+great, quiet love remained.  I was a tired old man, and Carlotta
+was to me an infinitely loved sister--or daughter--or
+granddaughter even--so old did I feel.  And when I raised her
+from the fender-stool, and kissed the tears from her eyes, it was
+as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been given in this world.
+
+
+The same old problem again.  What the deuce to do with Carlotta?
+Yet not quite the same: rather, what the deuce to do with
+Carlotta and myself?  In our strange relationship we were
+inextricably bound together.
+
+First, she needed sunshine--instead of the forlorn bleakness of
+an English spring--and a change from this house of pain and
+death.  And then I, too, felt the need of wider horizons.  London
+had grown to be a nightmare city which I never entered.  Its
+restless ambitions were not mine.  Its pleasures pleased me not.
+With not five of its five million inhabitants dared I speak heart
+to heart.  Judith had gone out of my life.  My aunts and cousins
+regarded me as beyond the moral pale.  Mrs. McMurray was still
+unaware of my return to England.  I confess to shabby treatment
+of my kind friend.  I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta
+in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta?
+Reasoning now I am convinced that she would: in those days I did
+not reason.  I shrank like a snail into its shell.  The simile is
+commonplace; but so was I--the most commonplace human snail that
+ever occupied a commonplace ten-roomed shell.  And now the house
+and its useless books and its million-fold more useless
+manuscript "History of Renaissance Morals," all its sombre
+memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities, became an
+unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble
+existence.  I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure
+Renaissance morals, and to go forth with Carlotta into the
+wilderness and the sunshine, there to fulfil whatever destiny the
+high gods should decree.
+
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast,
+where a month ago I began to write these latter pages.  Time has
+passed quickly since that day.
+
+I said then that on the previous afternoon something had
+happened.  It was something which I might have foreseen, which,
+in fact, with my habit of putting the telescope to my blind eye,
+I obstinately had refused to foresee.  During our wanderings I
+had watched the flowering of her splendid beauty as she drank in
+health from the glow of her own Orient.  I had noted the widening
+of her intellect, the quickening of her sympathies.  I had been
+conscious of the expansion of her soul in the great silences when
+the stars flamed over the infinite sea of sand.  But a growing
+wistfulness that was no longer the old doglike pleading of her
+glorious eyes, a gathering sadness that was not an aftermath of
+grief for the child that had gone--into this, if I did remark it,
+I did not choose to inquire.  Instead, I continued my study of
+Arabic and cultivated the acquaintance of a learned Moor whose
+conversation afforded--and still affords--me peculiar pleasure.
+One of these days I shall make a book of his Table-talk.  But now
+I have to tell of Carlotta.
+
+She accepted with alacrity my proposal that morning to ride over
+to the Palm Tree House for luncheon, as we had done several times
+before.  To please me, I think, she had resolutely overcome her
+natural indolence.  So much so that she had come to love the
+nomad life of steamers and caravans, and had grown restless,
+eager for fresh scenes, craving new impressions.  It was I who
+had cried a halt at Mogador where this furnished house to let,
+belonging to a German merchant absent in Europe, tempted me to
+rest awhile.  I am not so young as Carlotta, and I awakened to
+the fact of a circumambient universe so many years ago that I
+have grown slumberous.  Carlotta, if left to herself, would have
+gone on riding camels through Africa to the end of time.  She had
+changed in many essentials.  Instead of regarding me as an
+amiable purveyor of sweetmeats and other necessaries of life to
+which by the grace of her being Carlotta she was entitled, she
+treated me with human affection and sympathy, keeping her own
+wants in the background, anxious only to anticipate mine.  But
+she still loved sweetmeats and would eat horrible Moorish messes
+with an avidity only equalled by my repugnance.  She was still
+the same Carlotta.  On the other hand again, she had of late
+abandoned her caressing habits.  If she laid her hand on my arm,
+she did it timorously--whereat I would laugh and she would grow
+confused.  Once she had driven me to frenzy with her fondling.
+Those days had passed.  I told myself that I was as old as the
+sphinx we had moralised over in Egypt.
+
+We lunched, then, at the Palm Tree House and rode back in the
+cool of the afternoon to Mogador.  We were alone, as we knew the
+path across the tongue of desert, and had no need of a guide and
+the rabble of sore-eyed urchins who, like their attendant flies,
+infest the tourist on his journeyings.  On our right the desert
+rose to meet a near horizon; on our left sandhills and boulders
+cut off the view; ahead the shimmering line beyond which the sea
+and city lay.  We were enveloped by solitude and stillness.  In
+the clear African air objects detached themselves against the sky
+with startling definition.
+
+I had unconsciously ridden a bit ahead of Carlotta, thinking my
+own thoughts, and sighing as a man often does sigh, for the vague
+unattainable which is happiness.  Suddenly I missed her by my
+side, and turning round saw a sight that made my heart beat with
+its sheer beauty.  It was only Carlotta on her barbarically
+betrapped and besaddled mule.  But it was Carlotta glorified in
+colour.  She held above her head a cotton parasol, which she had
+bought to her delight and my disgust in Mogador; an impossible
+thing, all deep cherry reds and yellows; a hateful thing made for
+a pantomime--or for this African afternoon.  Outspread and
+luminous in the white sunlight its cherry reds and yellows
+floated like translucences of wine above Carlotta's bronze hair
+crowned by a white sun hat, her warm
+flesh-tints, and the dazzling white of her surah silk blouse; the
+whole picture cut out vivid against the indigo of the sky.  It
+was a radiant vision.  I stared openmouthed, smitten with the
+pang that sudden and transient loveliness can sometimes deal, as
+Carlotta approached, her figure swaying with the jog of her
+barbaric beast.  Her eyes were fixed on mine.  She halted, and
+for a moment we looked at one another; and in those wonderful
+eyes I saw for the first time a beautiful sadness, a spiritual
+appeal.  The moment passed.  We started again, side by side,
+neither speaking.  I did not look at her, conscious of a vague
+trouble.  Things that I had thought dead stirred in my heart.
+
+Presently like a dawn of infinite delicacy rose the city before
+us.  Its fairy minarets and towers gleamed first white in an
+atmosphere of pale amethyst toning through shades of green to the
+blue of the zenith.  And the lazy sea lay at the city's foot a
+pavement of lapis lazuli.  But all was faint, unreal.  Far, far
+away a group of palms caught opalescent reflections.  A slight
+breeze had sprung up, raising minute particles of sand which
+caused the elfland on the horizon to quiver like a mirage.
+
+"It is a dream-city," said I, in admiration.
+
+Carlotta did not reply.  I thought she had not heard.  We jogged
+on a little in silence.  At last she drew very close to me.
+
+"Shall we ever get there?" she asked, pointing ahead with the
+hand that held the reins.
+
+"To Mogador?  Yes, I hope so," I answered with a laugh.  I
+thought she was tired.
+
+"No, not Mogador.  The dream-city--where every one wants to get."
+
+"You have travelled far, my dear," said I, "to hanker now after
+dream-cities and the unattainable.  I knew a little girl once who
+would have asked: 'What is a dream-city?"
+
+"She doesn't ask now because she knows," replied Carlotta.  "No.
+We shall never get there.  It looks as if we were riding straight
+into it--but when we get close, it will just be Mogador."
+
+"Aren't you happy, Carlotta?" I asked.
+
+"Are you, Seer Marcous?"
+
+"I?  I am a philosopher, my child, and a happy philosopher would
+be a _lusus naturae_, a freak, a subject for a Barnum & Bailey
+Show.  If they caught him they would put him between the hairy
+man and the living skeleton."
+
+"I suppose I'm getting to be a philosopher, too," said Carlotta,
+"and I hate it!  Sometimes I think I hate everything and
+everybody
+--save you, Seer Marcous, darling.  It's wicked of me.  I must
+have been born wicked.  But I used to be happy.  I never wanted
+to go to dream-cities.  I was just like a cat.  Like Polyphemus.
+Do you remember Polyphemus?"
+
+"Yes," said I.  And then set off my balance by this strange
+conversation with Carlotta, I added: "I killed him."
+
+She turned a startled face to me.
+
+"You killed him?  Why?"
+
+"He laughed at me because I was unhappy," said I.
+
+"Through me?"
+
+"Yes; through you.  But that's neither here nor there.  We were
+not discussing the death of Polyphemus.  We were talking about
+being philosophers, and you said that as a philosopher you hated
+everything and everybodyexcept me.  Why do you exclude me,
+Carlotta?"
+
+We were riding so near together that my leg rubbed her saddle-
+girth.  I looked hard at her.  She turned away her head and put
+the pantomime parasol between us.  I heard a little choking sob.
+
+"Let us get off--and sit down a little--I want to cry.
+
+"The end of all feminine philosophy," I said, somewhat brutally.
+"No.  It's getting late.  That's only Mogador in front of us.
+Let us go to it."
+
+Carlotta shifted her parasol quickly.
+
+"What has happened to you, Seer Marcous?  You have never spoken
+to me like that before."
+
+"The very deuce seems to have happened," said I, angrily--though
+why I should have felt angry, heaven only knows.  "First you turn
+yourself into a Royal Academy picture with that unspeakable
+umbrella of yours and the trumpery blue sky and sunshine, and
+make my sentimental soul ache; and then you--"
+
+"It's a very pretty umbrella," said Carlotta, looking upwards at
+it demurely.
+
+"Give it to me," I said.
+
+She yielded it with her usual docility.  I cast it upon the
+desert.  Being open it gave one or two silly rebounds, then lay
+still.  Carlotta reined up her mule.
+
+"Oh-h!" she said, in her old way.
+
+I dismounted hurriedly, and helped her down and passed my arm
+through the two bridles.
+
+"My dear child," said I, "what is the meaning of all this?  Here
+we have been living for months the most tranquil and unruffled
+existence, and now suddenly you begin to talk about dream-cities
+and the impossibility of getting there, and I turn angry and
+heave parasols about Africa.  What is the meaning of it?"
+
+The most extraordinary part of it was that I should be treating
+Carlotta as a grown-up woman, after the fashion of the hero of a
+modern French novel.  Perhaps I was younger than I thought.
+
+She kept her eyes fixed downward.
+
+"Why are you angry with me?" she asked in a low voice.
+
+"I haven't the remotest idea," said I.
+
+She lifted her eyelids slowly--oh, very, very slowly, glanced
+quiveringly at me, while the shadow of a smile fluttered round
+her lips.  I verily believe the baggage exulted in her feminine
+heart.  I turned away, leading the two animals, and picked up the
+parasol which I closed and restored to her.
+
+"I thought you wanted to cry," I remarked.
+
+"I can't," said Carlotta, plaintively.
+
+"And you won't tell me why you exclude me from your universal
+hatred?"
+
+Carlotta dug up the sand with the point of her foot.  The sight
+of it recalled the row of pink toes thrust unashamedly before my
+eyes on the second day of her arrival in London.  An old hope, an
+old fear, an old struggle renewed themselves.  She was more
+adorably beautiful even than the Carlotta of the pink tus, and
+spiritually she was reborn.  I heard her whisper:
+
+"I can't."
+
+Now I had sworn to myself all the oaths that a man can swear that
+I should be Carlotta's grandfather to the end of time.  Hitherto
+I had felt the part.  Now suddenly grey beard and slippered
+pantaloons are cast aside and I am young again with a glow in my
+heart which beats fast at her beauty.  I shut my teeth.
+
+"No," said I to myself.  "The curtain shall not rise on that
+farcical tragedy again."
+
+I threw the reins on the neck of Carlotta's mule, which with its
+companion had been regarding us with bland stupidity.
+
+"I think we had better ride on, Carlotta," I said.  "Mount."
+
+She meekly gave me her little foot and I hoisted her into the
+saddle.
+
+We did not exchange a word till we reached Mogador.  But each of
+us felt that something had happened.
+
+At dinner we met as usual.  Carlotta spoke somewhat feverishly of
+our travels, and asked me numberless questions, betraying an
+unprecedented thirst for information.  I never gave her
+historical instruction with less zest.
+
+After the meal we went onto the flat roof.  Carlotta poured out
+my coffee at the small table beside the long Madeira cane chair
+which was my accustomed seat.  The starlit night was blue and
+languorous.  From some cafe came the monotonous strains of
+Moorish music, the harsh strings and harsh men's voices softened
+by the distance.  Carlotta took my coffee-cup when I had finished
+and set it down in her granddaughterly way.  Then she stood in
+front of me.
+
+"Won't you make a little room for me on your chair, Seer Marcous,
+darling?"
+
+I shifted my feet from the foot-rest and she sat down.  I may
+observe that I was not, in oriental bashawdom, occupying the one
+and only chair on the housetop.
+
+"Tell me about the stars," she said.
+
+I knew what she meant.  She loved the old Greek myths; their
+poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose,
+appealed to her young imagination.  She was passing through an
+exquisite phase of development.
+
+I scanned the heavens for a text and found one in the Pleiades.
+And I told her how these were seven daughters of Atlas and
+Pleione who herself was the daughter of the Sea, and how they
+were all pure maidens, save one, and were the companions of
+Artemis; how Orion the hunter, who was afterwards slain by
+Artemis and whose three-starred girdle gleamed up there in the
+sky, pursued them with evil intent, and how they prayed the gods
+for deliverance and were changed into the everlasting stars; and,
+lastly, how the one who was not a maiden, for she loved a mortal,
+shrank away from her sisters through shame and was invisible to
+the eye of man.
+
+"She was ashamed," said Carlotta in a low voice, "because she
+loved some one afterwards, one of the gods, who would not look at
+her because she had given herself to a mortal.  A woman then has
+a fire here"--she clasped her hands to her bosom--"and wishes she
+could burn away to nothing, nothing, just to air, and become
+invisible."
+
+She was rising hurriedly on the last word, but I brought my hands
+down on her shoulders.
+
+"Carlotta, my child," said I, "what do you mean?"
+
+She seized my wrists and struggling to rise, panted out in
+desperation:
+
+"You are one of the gods, and I wish I were changed into an
+invisible star."
+
+"I don't," said I, huskily.
+
+By main force I drew her to me and our lips met.  She yielded,
+and this time the whole soul of Carlotta came to me in the kiss.
+
+"It's beautiful to snuggle up against you again," said my ever
+direct Carlotta, after a while.  "I haven't done it--oh, for such
+a long time." She sighed contentedly.  "Seer Marcous--"
+
+" You must call me Marcus now," said I, somewhat fatuously.
+
+She shook her head as it lay on my shoulder.  "No.  You are
+Marcus
+--or Sir Marcus--to everybody.  To me you are always Seer
+Marcous.  Seer Marcous, darling," she half whispered after a
+pause.  "Once I did not know the difference between a god and a
+mortal.  It was only that morning when I woke up--"
+
+"You took me for a saint in a dressing-gown," said I.
+
+"It's the same thing," she retorted.  And then taking up her
+parable, she told me in her artless way the inner history of her
+heart since that morning; but what she said is sacred.  Also, a
+man feels himself to be a pitiful dog of a god when a woman
+relates how she came to establish him on her High Altar.
+
+Later we struck a lighter vein and spoke of the present, the
+enchantment of the hour, the scented air, the African stars.
+
+"It seems, my dear," said I, "that we have got to Nephelococcygia
+after all."
+
+"What is Nephelococcygia?" asked Carlotta.
+
+I relented.  "It's a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city,"
+said I.
+
+
+Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness;
+out of horror has sprung an everlasting love.  Many a man will
+say that in all my relations with Carlotta I have comported
+myself as a fool, and that my marriage is the crowning folly.
+Well, I pretend not unto wisdom.  Wisdom would have married me to
+five thousand a year, a position in fashionable society, my
+Cousin Dora and premature old age antecedent to eternal
+destruction.  I hold that my salvation has lain the way of folly.
+Again, it may be urged against me that I have squandered my life,
+that with all my learning, such as it is, I have achieved
+nothing.  I once thought so.  I boasted of it in my diary when I
+complacently styled myself a waster in Earth's factory.  Oh, that
+diary!  Let me here solemnly retract and abjure every crude and
+idiot opinion and reflection of life set forth in that frenetic
+record!  I regard myself not as a waster--I remember a passage in
+Epictetus treating of the ways of Providence:
+
+"For what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God?
+If then I were a nightingale I would do the part of a
+nightingale: if I were a swan, I would do like a swan.  But now I
+am a rational creature and I ought to praise God; this is my
+work, I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am
+allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song."
+
+No, I am neither nightingale nor swan, and cannot add, as they
+do, to the beauty of the earth.  The lame old man has his
+limitations; but within them, he can, by cleaving to his post and
+praising God, fulfil his destiny.
+
+Carlotta coming onto the housetop to summon me to lunch looks
+over my shoulder as I write these words.
+
+"But you are not a lame old man!" she cries in indignation.  "You
+are the youngest and strongest and cleverest man in the world!"
+
+"What am I to do with these miraculous gifts?" I ask, laughing.
+
+"You are to become famous," she says, with conviction.
+
+"Very well, my dear.  We will have to go to some new land where
+attaining fame is easier for a beginner than in London; and we'll
+send for Antoinette and Stenson to help us."
+
+"That will be very nice," she observes.
+
+So I am to become famous. _Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut_.  And
+Carlotta has got a soul of her own now and means to make the most
+of it.  It will lead me upward somewhere.  But whether I am to be
+king of New Babylon or Prime Minister of New Zealand or lawgiver
+to a Polynesian tribe is a secret as yet hidden in the lap of the
+gods, whence Carlotta doubtless will snatch it in her own good
+time.
+
+"You are writing a lot of rubbish," says Carlotta.
+
+"And a little truth.  The mixture is Life," I answer.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE ***
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