r this himself--arrange for a virtual separation? "I
feel," he said, "that I have lost the only thing in the world I really
care about--my liberty." It sounds, as I thus describe the situation,
as though my friend was acting in an entirely selfish and cold-blooded
manner; but I confess that it did not strike me in that light at the
time. He spoke in a mood of dreary melancholy, as a man might speak who
had committed a great mistake, and felt himself unequal to the
responsibilities he had assumed. He spoke of his wife with a deep
compassionateness, as though intensely alive to the sorrow that he had
inconsiderately inflicted upon her. He condemned himself unsparingly,
and said frankly that he had known all the time that he was doing wrong
in allowing himself to be carried away by his passion. "I hoped," he
said, "that it might have been the awakening of a new life in me, and
that it would be an initiation for me into the inner life of the world,
from which I had always been excluded." He went on to say that he would
make any sacrifice he could for her happiness--adding gravely, looking
at me with a strange air, that if he thought that she would be the
happier if he killed himself, he would not hesitate to do it. "But live
as we are living," he said, "I cannot. My life has become a continual
and wearing drama, in which I can never be myself, but am condemned to
play an unreal part."

I made him the only answer that was possible--namely, that I thought
that he had undertaken a certain responsibility and that he was bound
in honour to fulfil it. I added that I thought that the whole of his
future peace of mind depended upon his rising to the situation, even
though it were to be a martyrdom. I said that I thought, believing as I
did in the providential guidance of individual lives, that it was the
crisis of his fate; that he had the opportunity of playing a noble
part.

"Yes," he said dispassionately, "if it was the case of a single action
of the kind that is usually called heroic, I think I could do it; what
I can't say that I think I am equal to is the making of my life into
one long pretence; and what is more, it will not be successful--I
cannot hope to deceive her day after day."

"Well," I said, "it is a terrible position; but I think you are bound
to make the attempt."

"Thanks," he said; "you don't mind my having asked you? I thought it
would perhaps make things clearer, and I think that on the whole I
agree with