ed a mental somersault and built up a
picture of what I hoped I should find in life. It contained a woman, of
course--a girl, very young, the very spirit of spring, whose laugh
would turn my heart and who, like an elusive wood nymph, would lead me
panting and hungry through a maze of trees. I called it the Great
Emotion and from that night on I tried to find the original of that
boyish picture, looking everywhere with no success. At twenty-nine,
coming out of what seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I married
you to oblige my mother,--you asked for this,--and imagined that I had
settled into a conventional rut. Do you want me to go on with it?"

"Please, Gilbert," said Alice.

He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "Well, if you enjoy the
Christian martyr business it's entirely your lookout."

But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and became
more jerky and real. "I respected you, Alice," he went on. "I didn't
love you but I hoped I might, and I played the game. I liked to see you
in my house. You fitted in and made it more of a home than that barrack
had ever been. I began to collect prints and first editions, adjust
myself to respectability and even to look forward with pride to a young
Gilbert."

Alice gave a little cry and put her hand up to her breast. But he was
too much obsessed by his own pain to notice hers.

"And then,--it's always the way,--I saw the girl. Yes, by God, I saw
the girl, and the Great Emotion blew me out of domestic content and the
pleasant sense of responsibility and turned me into the panting hungry
youth that I had always wanted to be." He stopped and got up and walked
up and down that mausoleum, with his eyes burning and the color back in
his face.

"And the girl is Joan?" asked Alice in a voice that had an oddly sharp
note for once.

"Yes," he said. "Joan.... She's done it," he added, no longer choosing
his words. "She's got me. She's in my blood. I'm insane about her. I
follow her like a dog, leaping up at a kind word, slinking away with my
tail between my legs when she orders me to heel. My God, it's hell! I'm
as near madness as a poor devil of a dope fiend out of reach of his
joy. I wish I'd never seen her. She's made me loathe myself. She's put
me through every stage of humiliation. I'd rather be dead than endure
this craving that's worse than a disease. You were right when you said
that I'm ill. I am ill. I'm horribly ill. I'm ... I'm..."

He st