anged the
streets and _cafes_, seeking inspiration, returning to his lonely room
to lie wakeful, fighting his ghosts, or else to sob himself to sleep.

His theory of life had been amply proved. Blake had prated of the soul,
but it had been the body he had desired! Again and again that thought
had struck home, a savage spur goading him in daytime to a wild plying
of his brushes, gripping him in the lonely darkness of the night-time
until his sobs were suspended by their very poignancy and the scalding
tears dried before they could fall.

He saw darkly, he saw untruly, but the world is according to the
beholder's vision, and in those sultry days, when summer waxed and Paris
emptied, opening its gates to the foreigner, all the colors had receded
from existence and he had tasted the lees of life.

And now to-day it seemed that the climax had been reached. Seated idly
before his canvas, the whole procession of his Paris life unwound before
him--from the first tumultuous hour, when he had entered the Hotel
Railleux on fire for freedom, to this moment when, with dull resentful
eyes, he confronted the sum of his labors--an unfinished, sorry study
devoid of inspiration.

He stared at the flat canvas--the rough outline of his picture--the
reckless splashing on of color; and, abruptly, as if a hand had touched
him, he sprang to his feet, making havoc among the paint tubes that
strewed the floor, and turned summarily to the open window.

It was after eight o'clock, but the hazy, unreal daylight of a summer
evening made all things visible. He scanned the plantation, viewing it
as if in some travesty of morning; he looked down upon the city,
sleeping uneasily in preparation for the inevitable night of pleasure,
and a sudden loathing of Paris shook him. It seemed as if some gauzy
illusive garment had been lifted from a fair body and that his eyes,
made free of the white limbs, had discerned a corpse.

By a natural flight of ideas, the loathing of the city turned to
loathing of himself--to an unsatiable desire for self-forgetfulness, for
self-effacement. Solitude was no longer tenable, the walls of the
_appartement_ seemed to close in about him, stifling--suffocating him.
With a feverish movement, he turned from the window, picked up his hat
and fled the room.

On the landing he paused for a moment before the door of M. Cartel. He
had paid many visits to M. Cartel under stress of circumstances similar
to this, and invariably M.