ad time to think it over. How did the Duke acquit himself when he
came to the end of his cigarette? And by the way, how was it that after
he had read the telegram you didn't give him again an hour's grace?"

In a way, you have a perfect right to ask both those questions. But
their very pertinence shows that you think I might omit things that
matter. Please don't interrupt me again. Am _I_ writing this history, or
are you?

Though the news that he must die was a yet sharper douche, as you have
suggested, than the douche inflicted by Zuleika, it did at least leave
unscathed the Duke's pride. The gods can make a man ridiculous through
a woman, but they cannot make him ridiculous when they deal him a blow
direct. The very greatness of their power makes them, in that respect,
impotent. They had decreed that the Duke should die, and they had told
him so. There was nothing to demean him in that. True, he had just
measured himself against them. But there was no shame in being
gravelled. The peripety was according to the best rules of tragic art.
The whole thing was in the grand manner.

Thus I felt that there were no indelicacy, this time, in watching
him. Just as "pluck" comes of breeding, so is endurance especially an
attribute of the artist. Because he can stand outside himself, and (if
there be nothing ignoble in them) take a pleasure in his own sufferings,
the artist has a huge advantage over you and me. The Duke, so soon
as Zuleika's spell was broken, had become himself again--a highly
self-conscious artist in life. And now, standing pensive on the
doorstep, he was almost enviable in his great affliction.

Through the wreaths of smoke which, as they came from his lips, hung in
the sultry air as they would have hung in a closed room, he gazed up at
the steadfast thunder-clouds. How nobly they had been massed for him!
One of them, a particularly large and dark one, might with advantage,
he thought, have been placed a little further to the left. He made a
gesture to that effect. Instantly the cloud rolled into position.
The gods were painfully anxious, now, to humour him in trifles. His
behaviour in the great emergency had so impressed them at a distance
that they rather dreaded meeting him anon at close quarters. They rather
wished they had not uncaged, last night, the two black owls. Too late.
What they had done they had done.

That faint monotonous sound in the stillness of the night--the Duke
remembered it now. What