rld, and set himself
to do angel's work when people believed him at the devil's. He resolved
to wrap her, to envelop her in his influence, to enclose her in his
strong personality. Here, at last, was a grand, a noble opportunity
for the legitimate exercise of his master passion. He was confident of
victory.

But his faith in himself was misplaced. This woman, whom he thought so
weak, was yet stronger than he. Although he could not influence her, he
began to find that she could influence him. At first he struggled with
her vice, which he could not understand. He thought himself merely
horrified at it; then he began to lose the horror in wonder at its
power. Its virility, as it were, fascinated him just a little. A vice
so overwhelmingly strong seemed to him at length almost glorious, almost
God-like. There was a sort of humanity about it. Yes, it was like a
being who lived and who conquered.

The woman loved him, and he tried to win her from it; but her passion
for it was greater than her passion for him, greater than had been her
original passion for purity, for health, for success, for homage, for
all lovely and happiness-making things. Her passion for it was so great
that it roused the man's curiosity at last; it made him hold his breath,
and stand in awe, and desire furtively to try just once for himself what
its dominion was like, to test its power as one may test the power of an
electric battery. He dared not do this openly, for fear the fact of his
doing so might drive the woman still farther on the downward path. So in
secret he tasted the fascinations of her vice, once--and again--and yet
again. But still he struggled for her while he was ceasing to struggle
for himself. Still he combated for her the foe who was conquering him.
Very strange, very terrible was his position in that London house with
her, isolated from the world. For his friends had dropped him. Even
those who were not scandalized at his relations with this woman had
ceased to come near him. They found him blind and deaf to the ordinary
interests of life. He never went out anywhere, unless occasionally with
her to some theatre. He never invited anyone to come and see him. At
first the woman absorbed all his interest, all his powers of love--and
then at last the woman and her vice, which was becoming his too. By
degrees he sank lower and lower, but he never told the woman the truth,
and he still urged her to give up her horrible habit, which now he