ed at home, no doubt she would have
wiggled her way in before he could shut the door in her face. Then
there _would_ have been the devil to pay, for she would have seen to it
that he was hopelessly compromised. No doubt she would have run out on
the balcony and screamed for help. Her failure was the one saving
grace in the whole wretched night.

But she had planted her stings.

He was in a fine frame of mind to make love to a woman. He had
pictured that scene as one of the great moments of life, so subtly
beautiful and dramatic, so exalted and exulting, so perfect in its very
incompleteness, that not a lifetime of suffering and disappointment
could blur it. And he felt exactly like the flat tyre of Janet's
distinguished vernacular. Even his body was worn out, for he had had
but nine hours' sleep in two nights. What a dead cinch the playwrights
had. A man might as well try to breathe without oxygen on Mount
Everest as attempt to give his own life the proper dramatic values. He
was a cursed puppet and Life itself was a curse.

He excoriated himself for his susceptibility to mere words; he who
juggled in words, and often quite insincerely when it suited his
purpose. But "that rejuvenated old dame," and "that old Zattiany
woman" crawled like reeking vapors across some fair landscape a man had
spent his life seeking, blotting out its loveliness, turning it to a
noisome morass.

He had used equally caustic phrases when some young man he knew had
married a woman only ten years older than himself, and when old men had
taken to themselves young wives. And meant them, for he was
fundamentally as conventional and conservative as all men. . . . But
he cared less that he would be the laughing stock of New York than that
his own soul felt like boiling pitch and that he was ashamed of himself.

He looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes to four. There was
neither love nor desire in him and he would have liked to throw himself
on the divan and sleep. But he set his teeth and got to his feet. He
would go through it, play up, somehow.

He felt better in the nipping air and soon began to walk briskly. And
then as he crossed Park Avenue and entered her street he saw two men
coming down her steps. They were Mr. Dinwiddie, and the extremely
good-looking young man whom Osborne had brought to the box on Monday
night. The young man was smiling fatuously.

A wave of rage and jealousy swept Clavering from head to foo