t few years was already over-due. He had felt
it, without alarm at first, for the men of the West laughed him to scorn
and refused to shorten sail. They still refused. Perhaps they could not.
One thing was certain: he could scarcely manage to take in a single reef
on his own account. He was beginning to realise that the men with whom
rumour was busy were men marked down by their letters; and they either
would not or could not aid him in shortening sail.

For a month, now, under his bland and graceful learning among the
intimates of his set, Dysart had been slowly but steadily going to
pieces. At such moments as this it showed on the surface. It showed now
in his loose jaw and flaccid cheeks; in the stare of the quenched eyes.

He was going to pieces, and he was aware of it. For one thing, he
recognised the physical change setting in; for another, his cool,
selfish, self-centred equanimity was being broken down; the rigorous
bodily regime from which he had never heretofore swerved and which alone
enabled him to perform the exacting social duties expected of him, he
had recently neglected. He felt the impending bodily demoralisation,
the threatened mental disintegration; he suspected its symptoms in a
new nervous irritability, in lapses of self-command, in unaccountable
excesses utterly foreign to his habitual self-control.

Dissolute heretofore only in the negative form, whatever it was that
impended threatening him, seemed also to be driving him into an utter
and monstrous lack of caution, and--God alone knew how--he had at last
done the one thing that he never dreamed of doing. And the knowledge of
it, and the fear of it, bit deeper into his shallow soul every hour of
the day and night. And over all, vague, indefinite, hung something that
menaced all that he cared for most on earth, held most sacred--his
social position in the Borough of Manhattan and his father's pride in
him and it.

* * * * *

After a while he stood up in his pale blue silken costume of that
mincing, smirking century which valued a straight back and a well-turned
leg, and very slowly, as though tired, he walked to the door separating
his wife's dressing-room from his own.

"May I come in?" he asked.

A maid opened the door, saying that Mrs. Dysart had gone to Miss Quest's
room to have her hair powdered. He seated himself; the maid retired.

For a while he sat there, absently playing with his gilt-hilted sword,