rs? Why, heavens, how you are changed! How gloomy you look.
One would think you had swallowed a hearse and had not digested the
trappings----"

To all of which Berselius bowed.

"_You_ are just the same as ever," said he.

The woman flushed under her rouge, for there was something in Berselius's
tone that made the simple words an insult. Before she could reply,
however, the block in the traffic ceased, and as the carriage drove on
Berselius bowed again to her coldly, and as though she were a stranger
with whom he had spoken for a moment, and whom he had never seen before.

At the club in the smoking room, where he went for an absinthe before
luncheon, he met Colonel Tirard, the very man who had presided at the
banquet given to him on the day of his leaving for Africa. This man, who
had been his friend, this man, in whose society he had always felt
pleasure, was now obnoxious to him. And after a while the weird fact was
borne in on the mind of Berselius that Tirard was not talking to him.
Tirard was talking to the man who was dead--the other Berselius. The new
rifle for the army, which filled Tirard's conversation, would have been an
interesting subject to the old Berselius; it was absolutely distasteful to
the new.

Now, for the first time, he quite clearly recognized that all the friends,
pursuits, and interests that had filled his life till this, were useless
to him and dead as the cast-off self that had once dominated his being.
Not only useless and dead, but distasteful in a high degree. He would have
to re-create a world of interests for himself out of new media. He was
living in a world where all the fruit and foliage and crops had been
blighted by some wizard's wand; he would have to re-plant it over anew,
and at the present moment he did not know where to cast about him for a
single seed.

Yet he did not give in all at once. Like a person persisting in some
disagreeable medicine, hoping to become accustomed to it, he continued his
conversation with Tirard.

After luncheon, he sat down to a game of ecarte in the card-room with an
old acquaintance, but after half an hour's play he left the table on the
plea of indisposition and left the club, taking his way homeward on foot.

Near the Madeleine occurred one of those incidents which, in tragic lives,
appear less incidents than occurrences prepared by Fate, as though she
would say, "Look and deny me if you dare."

Toward Berselius was approaching a victori