ridal bed that filled him with the most intense pangs of jealousy--Herr
Carovius sat in his room playing Chopin's _etude_ of the revolution. He
would begin it again and again; he struck the keys with ever-increasing
violence; the time in which he played the _etude_ became wilder and
wilder; the swing of his gestures became more and more eloquent; and his
face became more and more threatening.

He was squaring accounts with the woman he had been unable to bring
before his Neronic tribunal in bodily form; and all the pent-up hatred
in his heart for the musician Nothafft he was emptying into the music of
another man. The envy of the man doomed to limit his display of talent
to the appreciation of what another had created laid violent hands on
the creator; the impotence of the taster was infuriated at the cook. It
was as if a flunked and floored comedian had gone out into the woods to
declaim his part with nothing but the echo of his own voice to answer
back.

His hatred of things in general, of the customs of human society, of
order and prosperity, of state and family, of love and marriage, of man
and woman, had burst out into lurid flames. It was rare that a man had
so cut, slashed, and vilified himself as did this depatriated citizen
while playing the piano. He converted music into an orgy, a debauch, a
debasing crime.

"Enough!" he bellowed, as he closed with an ear-splitting discord. He
shut the piano with a vituperative bang, and threw himself into a
rickety leather chair.

What his inner eye saw mocks at language and defies human speech. He was
in that house over there; it lay in his power to murder his rival; he
could abuse the woman who had been denied him by the wily tricks of
circumstances; he chastised her; he dragged her from her bed of pleasure
by the hair. He feasted on her sense of shame and on the angry
twitchings of the musician, tied, bound, and gagged. He spared them no
word of calumniation. The whole city stood before his court, and
listened to the sentence he passed. Everybody stood in awe of him.

Thus it is that the citizen of the moral stature of Herr Carovius
satisfies his thirst for revenge. Thus does the Nero of our time punish
the crimes mankind commits against him in that it creates pleasures and
enjoyments of which he is not in a position to partake.

But because he felt more abandoned to-day than ever, and more fearful in
his abandonment, and because he felt so keenly the injustice done