ing himself alone, he went to a mirror to note the changes. At
first he seemed the same Mike Fletcher; but by degrees he recognized,
or thought he recognized, certain remote and subtle differences. He
thought that the tenderness which used to reside in his eyes was
evanescent or gone. This tenderness had always been to him a subject
of surprise, and he had never been able to satisfactorily explain its
existence, knowing as he knew how all tenderness was in contradiction
to his true character; at least, as he understood himself. This
tenderness was now replaced by a lurking evil look, and he remembered
that he had noted such evil look in certain old libertines. Certain
lines about the face had grown harder, the hollow freckled cheeks
seemed to have sunk a little, and the pump-handle chin seemed to be
defining itself, even to caricature. There was still a certain air of
_bravoure_, of truculence, which attracted, and might still charm. He
turned from the mirror, went up-stairs, and danced three or four
times. He remained until the last, and followed by an increasing
despair he muttered, as he got into a hansom--

"If this is civilization I'd better go back to the Arabs."

The solitude of his rooms chilled him in the roots of his mind; he
looked around like a hunted animal. He threw himself into an
arm-chair. Like a pure fire ennui burned in his heart.

"Oh, for rest! I'm weary of life. Oh, to slip back into the
unconscious, whence we came, and pass for ever from the fitful
buzzing of the midges. To feel that sharp, cruel, implacable
externality of things melt, vanish, and dissolve!

"The utter stupidity of life! There never was anything so stupid; I
mean the whole thing--our ideas of right and wrong, love and duty,
etc. Great Scott! what folly. The strange part of it all is man's
inability to understand the folly of living. When I said to that
woman to-night that I believed that the only evil is to bring
children into the world, she said, 'But then the world would come to
an end.' I said, 'Do you not think it would be a good thing if it
did?' Her look of astonishment proved how unsuspicious she is of the
truth. The ordinary run of mortals do not see into the heart of
things, nor do we, except in terribly lucid moments; then, seeing
life truly, seeing it in its monstrous deformity, we cry out like
children in the night.

"Then why do we go to Death with terror-stricken faces and reluctant
feet? We should go to Death