lking so much, and pointed out to me a
photograph of Coralie that stood on the mantelpiece more than
half-hidden by letters and papers, saying, "I suppose she set me off;
somehow she seems to me a sort of embodiment of the thing."

It was three o'clock when I left him; even then I went reluctantly,
traversing again in my mind the field that his tongue had easily and
lightly covered, and reverting to the girl who, as he said, was a sort
of embodiment of the thing. The phrase was definite enough for its
purpose, and struck home with an undeniable truth. He and she were the
sort of people to live in that sort of world, and to stand as its
representatives. A feeling came over me that it was a fair fine world,
where life need not be a struggle, where a man need not live alone,
where he would not be striving always after what he could never achieve,
waging always a war in which he should never conquer, staking all his
joys against most uncertain shadowy prizes, which to win would bring no
satisfaction. I cried out suddenly, as I walked by myself through the
night, "There's no pleasure in my life." That protest summed up my
wrongs. There was no pleasure in my life. There was everything else, but
not that, not pure, unmixed, simple pleasure. Had I no right to some? I
was very tired of trying to fill my place, of subordinating myself to my
position, of being always Augustin the King. I was weary of my own
ideal. I felt that I ought to be allowed to escape from it sometimes, to
be, as it were, _incognito_ in soul as well as in body, so that what I
thought and did should not be reckoned as the work of the King's mind or
the act of the King's hand. I envied intensely the lot and the temper of
my friend Varvilliers. When I reached the palace and entered it, it
seemed to me as though I were returning to a prison. Its walls shut me
off from that free existence whose sweetness I had tasted, and forbade
me to roam in the fields whither youth beckoned and curiosity lured me.
That joy could never be mine. My burden was ever with me; the woman I
had loved was gone; the girl I must be made husband to was soon to come.
I was not and could not be as other young men.

That all this, the conversation with Varvilliers, its effect on me, my
restless discontent and angry protests against my fate, should follow on
meeting Coralie Mansoni at supper will not seem strange to anybody who
remembers her.

CHAPTER XV.

THE HAIR-DRESSER WAITS.