of woeful
outline on our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of
things, he must from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive
nimbleness, up to the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it
again. There is a repentance that does reconstitute! It may help to the
traceing to springs of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out
of the wood.

Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every
debt with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt
apologies for a short brush of his temper. Nay, he had such a conscience
for the smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish
to say a friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge,
softened his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once.
Although this man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature
which drives to unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen
at its beating after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for
the reverse of lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship.
So social a man could not otherwise incline. But when it came to the
examination of accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of
physical revulsion, loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out
of Court. To men, it was impossible for him to speak the torments of
those days of the monstrous alliance. The heavens were cognizant. He
pleaded his case in their accustomed hearing:--a youngster tempted by
wealth, attracted, besought, snared, revolted, etc. And Mrs. Burman,
when roused to jealousy, had shown it by teazing him for a confession of
his admiration of splendid points in the beautiful Nataly, the priceless
fair woman living under their roof, a contrast of very life, with the
corpse and shroud; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her
breath about him, her voice incessantly upon every chord of his being!

He pleaded successfully. But the silence following the verdict was
heavy; the silence contained an unheard thunder. It was the sound, as
when out of Court the public is dissatisfied with a verdict. Are we
expected to commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
public?--Imagine it for a moment as done. Men are ours at a word--or at
least a word of invitation. Women we woo; fluent smooth versions of our
tortures, mixed with permissible courtship, win the individual woman.
And that unreasoning collective woman, icy, deadly, conde