upstairs, arranged herself decoratively upon her bed--she was a
sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white cheeks, long hair,
the eyelashes falling like a tiny curtain on her cheeks. She drank the
little phial of prussic acid and there she lay.--Oh, extremely charming
and clear-cut--looking with a puzzled expression at the electric-light
bulb that hung from the ceiling, or perhaps through it, to the stars
above. Who knows? Anyhow, there was an end of Florence.

You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the end of
Florence. From that day to this I have never given her another thought;
I have not bestowed upon her so much as a sigh. Of course, when it has
been necessary to talk about her to Leonora, or when for the purpose of
these writings I have tried to figure her out, I have thought about her
as I might do about a problem in algebra. But it has always been as a
matter for study, not for remembrance. She just went completely out of
existence, like yesterday's paper.

I was so deadly tired. And I dare say that my week or ten days of
affaissement--of what was practically catalepsy--was just the repose
that my exhausted nature claimed after twelve years of the repression of
my instincts, after twelve years of playing the trained poodle. For
that was all that I had been. I suppose that it was the shock that did
it--the several shocks. But I am unwilling to attribute my feelings
at that time to anything so concrete as a shock. It was a feeling so
tranquil. It was as if an immensely heavy--an unbearably heavy knapsack,
supported upon my shoulders by straps, had fallen off and left my
shoulders themselves that the straps had cut into, numb and without
sensation of life. I tell you, I had no regret. What had I to regret?
I suppose that my inner soul--my dual personality--had realized long
before that Florence was a personality of paper--that she represented a
real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with
emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold. I
know that sort of feeling came to the surface in me the moment the
man Bagshawe told me that he had seen her coming out of that fellow's
bedroom. I thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was just a mass
of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even
possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run
up sooner to her room and might have prevented her drinking the