gs. Finally, she sat on a
moss-bank, reached and took a musk-rose on her palm, and looked
hopelessly at it.

* * * * *

One minute after my first actual sight of her my extravagance of
agitation, I say, died down to something like calm. The earth was mine
by old right: I felt that: and this creature a mere slave upon whom,
without heat or haste, I might perform my will: and for some time I
stood, coolly enough considering what that will should be.

I had at my girdle the little cangiar, with silver handle encrusted with
coral, and curved blade six inches long, damascened in gold, and sharp
as a razor; the blackest and the basest of all the devils of the Pit was
whispering in my breast with calm persistence: 'Kill, kill--and eat.'

_Why_ I should have killed her I do not know. That question I now ask
myself. It must be true, true that it is '_not good_' for man to be
alone. There was a religious sect in the Past which called itself
'Socialist': and with these must have been the truth, man being at his
best and highest when most social, and at his worst and lowest when
isolated: for the Earth gets hold of all isolation, and draws it, and
makes it fierce, base, and materialistic, like sultans, aristocracies,
and the like: but Heaven is where two or three are gathered together. It
may be so: I do not know, nor care. But I know that after twenty years
of solitude on a planet the human soul is more enamoured of solitude
than of life, shrinking like a tender nerve from the rough intrusion of
Another into the secret realm of Self: and hence, perhaps, the
bitterness with which solitary castes, Brahmins, patricians,
aristocracies, always resisted any attempt to invade their
slowly-acquired domain of privileges. Also, it may be true, it may, it
may, that after twenty years of solitary selfishness, a man becomes,
without suspecting it--not at all noticing the slow stages--a real and
true beast, a horrible, hideous beast, mad, prowling, like that King of
Babylon, his nails like birds' claws, and his hair like eagles'
feathers, with instincts all inflamed and fierce, delighting in
darkness and crime for their own sake. I do not know, nor care: but I
know that, as I drew the cangiar, the basest and the slyest of all the
devils was whispering me, tongue in cheek: 'Kill, kill--and be merry.'

With excruciating slowness, like a crawling glacier, tender as a nerve
of the touching leaves, I moved, I stol