his thin and ragged jacket to go home--a plunge, as
it were, from molten iron into ice, with no protection from the cold.
Every step of the homeward way was hateful to him. Yet he knew his own
weakness well enough not to hesitate. Had he stopped, he might have been
capable of turning in some other direction, and of spending the whole
evening with some of his fellow-artists, going home late in the night,
when Gloria would be asleep. The thought crossed his mind. If he did
that, he was sure to be carried away into speaking of his troubles to
men with whom he had no intimacy. He was too proud for that. He wished
he could go back to Francesca, and pour out his woes again. He had not
said half enough. He should like to have it out, to the very end, and
then lie down and close his eyes, and hear Francesca's voice soothing
him and speaking of their golden friendship. But that was impossible, so
he went home to face his misery as best he could.

There was exaggeration in all he thought, but there was none in the
effect of his thoughts upon himself. He had married a woman unsuited to
him in every way, as he was unsuited to her. The whole trouble lay
there. Possibly he was not a man to marry at all, and should have led
his solitary life to the end, illuminated from the outside, as it were,
by Francesca Campodonico's faithful friendship and sweet influence. All
causes of disagreement, considered as forces in married life, are
relative in their value to the comparative solidity of the characters on
which they act--a truism which ought to be the foundation of social
charity, but is not. Reanda could not be blamed for his brittle
sensitivenesses, nor Gloria for a certain coarse-grained streak of
cruelty, which she had inherited from her father, and which had
combined strangely with the rare gifts and great faults of her dead
mother--the love of emotion for its own sake, and the tendency to do
everything which might produce it in herself and those about her.
Emotion was poison to Reanda. It was his wife's favourite food.

He reached his home, and went up the well-lighted marble staircase,
wishing that he were ascending the narrow stone steps at the back of the
Palazzetto Borgia, taper in hand, to his old bachelor quarters, to light
his lamp, to smoke in peace, and to spend the evening over a sketch, or
with a book, or dreaming of work not yet done. He paused on the landing,
before he rang the bell of his apartment. The polished door