dispenses with the
family, he must embrace the cloister; John has done that; but now I
know that man may not live without wife, without child, without God!"

* * * * * *

Next day, after breakfast, he lay in his arm-chair, thinking of the
few hours that lay between him and the fall of night. He sought to
tempt his jaded appetite with many assorted dissipations, but he
turned from all in disgust, and gambling became his sole distraction.
Every evening about eleven he was seen in Piccadilly, going towards
Arlington Street, and every morning about four the street-sweepers
saw him returning home along the Strand. Then, afraid to go to bed,
he sometimes took pen and paper and attempted to write some lines of
his long-projected poem. But he found that all he had to say he had
said in the sketch which he found among his papers. The idea did not
seem to him to want any further amplification, and he sat wondering
if he could ever have written three or four thousand lines on the
subject.

The casual eye and ear still recognized no difference in him. There
were days when he was as good-looking as ever, and much of the old
fascination remained: but to one who knew him well, as Harding did,
there was no doubt that his life had passed its meridian. The day was
no longer at poise, but was quietly sinking; and though the skies
were full of light, the buoyancy and blitheness that the hours bear
in their ascension were missing; lassitude and moodiness were aboard.

More than ever did he seek women, urged by a nervous erethism which
he could not explain or control. Married women and young girls came
to him from drawing-rooms, actresses from theatres, shop-girls from
the streets, and though seemingly all were as unimportant and
accidental as the cigarettes he smoked, each was a drop in the ocean
of the immense ennui accumulating in his soul. The months passed,
disappearing in a sheer and measureless void, leaving no faintest
reflection or even memory, and his life flowed in unbroken weariness
and despair. There was no taste in him for anything; he had eaten of
the fruit of knowledge, and with the evil rind in his teeth, wandered
an exile beyond the garden. Dark and desolate beyond speech was his
world; dark and empty of all save the eyes of the hound Ennui; and by
day and night it watched him, fixing him with dull and unrelenting
eyes. Sometimes these acute strainings of his consciousness lasted
o