story as I do of yours.
Supple woman that; when the rather scraggy blonde does take it into her
head to be a devil she's the worst kind there is...."

Without apology Romarin looked at his watch.

"All right," said Marsden, smiling, "for what _I've_ got out of life,
then. But I warn you, it's entirely discreditable."

Romarin did not doubt it.

"But it's mine, and I boast of it. I've done--barring receiving honours
and degrees--everything--everything! If there's anything I haven't done,
tell me and lend me a sovereign, and I'll go and do it."

"You haven't told the story."

"That's so. Here goes then ... Well, you know, unless you've forgotten,
how I began...."

Fruit and nutshells and nutcrackers lay on the table between them, and at
the end of it, shielded from draughts by the menu cards, the coffee
apparatus simmered over its elusive blue flame. Romarin was taking the
rind from a pear with a table-knife, and Marsden had declined port in
favour of a small golden liqueur of brandy. Every seat in the restaurant
was now occupied, and the proprietor himself had brought his finest
cigarettes and cigars. The waiter poured out the coffee, and departed
with the apparatus in one hand and his napkin in the other.

Marsden was already well into his tale...

The frightful unction with which he told it appalled Romarin. It was as
he had said--there was nothing he had not done and did not exult in with
a sickening exultation. It had, indeed, ended in diabetes. In the pitiful
hunting down of sensation to the last inch he had been fiendishly
ingenious and utterly unimaginative. His unholy curiosity had spared
nothing, his unnatural appetite had known no truth. It was grinning sin.
The details of it simply cannot be told....

And his vanity in it all was prodigious. Romarin was pale as he listened.
What! In order that _this_ malignant growth in Society's breast should
be able to say "I know," had sanctities been profaned, sweet conventions
assailed, purity blackened, soundness infected, and all that was bright
and of the day been sunk in the quagmire that this creature of the night
had called--yes, stilled called--by the gentle name of Romance? Yes,
so it had been. Not only had men and women suffered dishonour, but
manhood and womanhood and the clean institutions by which alone the
creature was suffered to exist had been brought to shame. And what was he
to look at when it was all done?...

"Romance--Beauty--the Beauty of