for the first time in my life--and I was a man nearly forty. I
wanted her with every quivering nerve in me. And she was gone. Lost in
the vast expanse of Europe with a parcel of performing cats. Gone out of
my life loving me as I loved her, all on account of this Hell-invented
principle. Ye gods! If the fierce, pure, deep, abiding love of a man for
a woman is not a reality, what in this world of shadows is anything but
vapour? I grasped it tight, hugged it to my bosom--and now she was gone,
and in my ears rang the derisive laughter of the enemy.

Where would it end? What would happen next? Nothing was too
outrageously, maniacally impossible. I walked up Sloane Street, a
street for which impeccable respectability, security of life and person,
comfortable, modern, twentieth-century, prosperous smugness has no
superior in all the smug cities of the earth, and I was prepared to
encounter with a smile of recognition anything that the whirling brains
of Bedlam had ever conceived. Why should not this little lady tripping
along with gold chain-bag and anxious, shopping knit of the brow, throw
her arms round my neck and salute me as her long-lost brother? Why
should not the patient horses in that omnibus suddenly turn into
griffins and begin to snort fire from their nostrils? Why should not
that policeman, who, on his beat, was approaching me with the heavy,
measured tread, suddenly arrest me for complicity in the Pazzi
Conspiracy or the Rye House Plot? Why should not the whole of the
decorous street suddenly change into the inconsequence of an Empire
ballet? Why should not the heavens fall down and universal chaos envelop
all?

The only possible reason I can think of now is that the Almighty Powers
did not consider it worth while to go to quite so much trouble on my
account.

This, however, gives you some idea of my state of mind. But though it
lasted for a considerable time, I would not have you believe that I
fostered it unduly. Indeed, I repudiated it with some disgust. I took it
out, examined it, and finding it preposterous, set to work to modify it
into harmony with the circumstances of my every-day life. Even the most
sorely tried of men cannot walk abroad shedding his exasperation around
like pestilence. If he does, he is put into a lunatic asylum.

If a man cannot immediately assuage the hunger of his heart, he must
meet starvation with a smiling face. In the meantime, he has to eat so
as to satisfy the hunger of hi