atisfaction and personal pride that comes
from conscious superiority to one's neighbours. I had lived the life of
a Puritan, but I had neither the heart nor brain of one. None of the
rigid bigotry, none of the exultant delight in morality, none of the
merciless joy in trampling upon pleasure which gives him his reward. I
looked round upon life and its many devious ways with eyes listless and
indifferent to its vice and sympathetic to its pleasure, and back upon
my own straight path with something of regret that my self-respect had
been strong enough to hold me to it. And now the temptation came to
sacrifice all that I had clung to. To abolish the thought and
remembrance of my talent, muffle and stifle the powers of the brain,
and remember only that I had the pulses and senses and blood of a man.
It came over me slowly, this phase of rebellious animalism, like a
mantle falling over me. Thought followed thought insidiously,
imperceptibly, like fold upon fold of a cloth dropped upon me, as I sat
in the silent room alone. To take this girl and force back her art upon
itself, to mutilate her brain-power and drug it with her roused
sensuality, to turn her into a simple instrument of pleasure for
myself, and lend myself to her as such. To yield to this inflowing tide
of desire that beat, now, heavily through all my veins, and let the
brain go down beneath its waves.

If I chose I could do it, and none but myself could gauge the depth of
my debasement. No eye could discern the high level ground now on which
I stood and the morass that swam before me. I should marry this girl
and the world asks no more. This other lower life that lay in my power
appealed to me in all its sweetness--this woman as she would be when
mine. Those lips with the mark of mine upon them; those delicate nerves
stung to frenzy; that form tense, and the limbs strung with passion;
those eyes terror-stricken between anguish and ecstasy.

The thought of the woman's personality clung to me like a viscous web.
I struggled against it, but it enwrapped me; I could not shake it from
me.

Again and again my arm encircled those soft yielding shoulders; the
warm agitated bosom was touching mine; my hands held, and felt within
it, the smooth muscles of the white arm--a vision of the whole
indefinably supple form swam giddily before me in a suffocating
proximity, till I pressed my hands on my eyes, and the thought came
involuntarily,--Is this insanity?

My brain ga