med frankness that if he had never kissed her
again he should probably have continued to regard her with a charming,
if impractical, sentiment. But marriage had brushed off the bloom of
that early romance; and as he recognised this, he felt a keen resentment
against nature which had cheated him into believing that the illusion of
love would not vanish at the first touch of reality.

He had lived upon the surface of things and the surface had contented if
it had not satisfied him. It had never entered his thoughts to question
if he had had from life the best that it could offer, but he had
sometimes wondered, in moments of nervous exasperation against small
events, why it was that there could be no end under the sun to a man's
pursuit of the fugitive sensation. When he looked back now over the
breathless years of his life, he saw, almost with indignation, that
whatever punishment fate had held in reserve for him, the avenger had
inevitably appeared in the form his own gratified desire. He had
withheld his hand from nothing; the thing that he had wanted he had
taken without question--impulse and possession had flowed for him with a
rhythmic regularity of movement--and yet in glancing back he could place
his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me
happiness--and this--and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap
and threadbare--woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions--and he
felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life,
that he had been deluded into a childish yet irretrievable error.

As he sat there over his paper, he remembered his impatient early love,
his ecstatic marriage, and then the long years during which he had
lived, as he put it to himself, in a "mortal funk" of the divorce court.
Not moral obligation, but social cowardice, he admitted, had held him in
a bondage from which his wife had at last liberated him by a single
blow. Well, it was all over! he heaved a sigh of relief, emptied his
coffee cup, and dismissed the subject, with its oppressive train of
associations, from his mind.

But his temperamental blitheness had suffered in the chill of
recollection, and he frowned down upon the staring headlines which
ornamented the open page before him. His face, which recorded unerringly
the slightest emotional change through which he passed, grew suddenly
heavy and was over clouded by a momentary fit of gloom. He had not seen,
had hardly thought of his for