ulfillment--and however unselfishly--the more
one excludes. Life contracts to a vivid, hypnotizing point; all else is
shadow. In the name of our common humanity, there is a good deal to be
said for those who are fickle or frankly pagan, who love more lightly,
and more easily forget. But enough of all this! Phil with his steady
wisdom might philosophize it to some purpose; not I.

In my uncertainty of mind, then, the first step that I took was an
absurdly false one. There was just one thing for me to do, and I did not
do it. I should have gone straight to Susan and told her about Jimmy and
Jeanne-Marie; above all, about James Aulard Kane. Even if Susan, as I
then supposed, loved Jimmy, and had always loved him--knowing her as I
did, loving her as I did, I should have felt instinctively that this was
the one wise and kind, the one possible thing to do. Yet a sudden
weakness, born of innate cowardice, betrayed me.

I went, instead, direct to the Hotel Crillon and sent up my card to Miss
Leslie; it struck me as fortunate that I found her just returned to her
rooms from a visit to Susan. It was really a calamity. I had seen her
several times there, at the hospital; I liked her; and I knew that Susan
had now no more devoted friend. She received me cordially, and I at once
laid all the facts before her and--with an entirely sincere
humbleness--asked her advice. But God, in the infinite variety of his
creations, had never intended Mona Leslie to shine by reason of insight
or common sense; she had other qualities! And this, too, I should easily
have discerned. Why I did not, can only be explained by a sort of
prostration of all my faculties, which had come upon me with the events
of the night and morning just past. I was inert, body and soul; I could
not think; I felt like a child in the sweep of dark forces it cannot
struggle against and does not understand; in effect, I was for the time
being a stricken, credulous child. Perhaps no grown man, not definitely
insane, has ever touched a lower stratum of spiritual debility than I
then sank to--resting there, grateful, fatuously content, as if on firm
ground. In short, I was a plain and self-damned fool.

It seemed to me, I remember, during our hour's talk together, that Miss
Leslie was one of the two or three wisest, most understanding, and
sympathetic persons I had ever met. Sympathetic, she genuinely was; very
gracious and interestingly melancholy, in her Belgian nurse's costum