in despair.

"Come," I said, "there must be something in the Letters."

No, the Letters were all about himself, and there wasn't anything in
_him_. You couldn't conceive the futility, the fatuity, the
vanity--it was a disease with him.

"I couldn't have believed it, Simpson, if I hadn't seen him empty
himself."

"But the hinterland?" I said. "How about the hinterland? That was
what you were to have opened up."

"There wasn't any hinterland. He's opened himself up. You can see
all there was of him. It's lamentable, Simpson, lamentable."

I said it seemed to me to be supremely funny. And he said I wouldn't
think it funny if I were responsible for it.

"But you aren't," I said. "You must drop it. You can't be mixed up
with _that_. The thing's absurd."

"Absurd? Absurdity isn't in it. It's infernal, Simpson, what this
business will mean to me."

"Look here," I said. "This is all rot. You can't go on with it."

He groaned. "I _must_ go on with it. If I don't----"

"Antigone will hang herself?"

"No. She won't hang herself. She'll chuck me. That's how she has me,
it's how I'm fixed. Can you conceive a beastlier position?"

I said I couldn't, and that if a girl of mine put me in it, by
heaven, I'd chuck _her_.

He smiled. "You can't chuck Antigone," he said.

I said Antigone's attitude was what I didn't understand. It was
inconceivable she didn't know what the things were like. "What do
you suppose she really thinks of them?"

That was it. She had never committed herself to an opinion. "You
know," he said, "she never did."

"But," I argued, "you told me yourself she said they'd represent
him. And they do, don't they?"

"Represent him?" He grinned in his agony. "I should think they did."

"But," I persisted, because he seemed to me to be shirking the
issue, "it was her idea, wasn't it? that they'd justify him, give
him his chance to speak, to put himself straight with _us_?"

"She seems," he said meditatively, "to have taken that for granted."

"Taken it for granted? Skittles!" I said. "She must have seen they
were impossible. I'm convinced, Burton, that she's seen it all
along; she's merely testing you to see how you'd behave, how far
you'd go for her. You needn't worry. You've gone far enough. She'll
let you off."

"No," he said, "she's not testing me. I'd have seen through her if
it had been that. It's deadly serious. It's a sacred madness with
her. She'll never let me off. She'll never let hers