. Look round you--there's your answer, if you only care
to see. Nothing that outrages the received beliefs can be right. Your
conscience tells you that. They are the received beliefs because they
are the best, the noblest, the only possible. They survive. . . ."

He could not help noticing with pleasure the philosophic breadth of his
view, but he could not pause to enjoy it, for his inspiration, the call
of august truth, carried him on.

"You must respect the moral foundations of a society that has made
you what you are. Be true to it. That's duty--that's honour--that's
honesty."

He felt a great glow within him, as though he had swallowed something
hot. He made a step nearer. She sat up and looked at him with an ardour
of expectation that stimulated his sense of the supreme importance of
that moment. And as if forgetting himself he raised his voice very much.

"'What's right?' you ask me. Think only. What would you have been if
you had gone off with that infernal vagabond? . . . What would you have
been? . . . You! My wife! . . ."

He caught sight of himself in the pier glass, drawn up to his full
height, and with a face so white that his eyes, at the distance,
resembled the black cavities in a skull. He saw himself as if about to
launch imprecations, with arms uplifted above her bowed head. He was
ashamed of that unseemly posture, and put his hands in his pockets
hurriedly. She murmured faintly, as if to herself--

"Ah! What am I now?"

"As it happens you are still Mrs. Alvan Hervey--uncommonly lucky for
you, let me tell you," he said in a conversational tone. He walked up to
the furthest corner of the room, and, turning back, saw her sitting very
upright, her hands clasped on her lap, and with a lost, unswerving gaze
of her eyes which stared unwinking like the eyes of the blind, at the
crude gas flame, blazing and still, between the jaws of the bronze
dragon.

He came up quite close to her, and straddling his legs a little, stood
looking down at her face for some time without taking his hands out of
his pockets. He seemed to be turning over in his mind a heap of words,
piecing his next speech out of an overpowering abundance of thoughts.

"You've tried me to the utmost," he said at last; and as soon as he said
these words he lost his moral footing, and felt himself swept away from
his pinnacle by a flood of passionate resentment against the bungling
creature that had come so near to spoiling his life. "Yes;