he hair shirt of penitence--that is the
only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a psychologist, can
explain the sustained act of folly.

And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he accepted it
gay and debonair, what could have been the state of that man's soul? I
remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian's face, at Mr.
Jornicroft's dinner party, as if a hand had swept the joy from it, and
the snapping of the stem of the wineglass. In the light of knowledge I
looked back and recognised the feverishness of a demeanour that had been
merely gay before. Well . . . he had been swept off his feet. If any man
ever loved a woman passionately and devoutly, Adrian loved Doria. For
what it may be worth, put that to his credit: he sinned for love of a
woman. And the rest? The tragic rest? His undertaking to write another
novel? Indomitable self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless,
casual lover of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set
himself to do heretofore, he had done.

As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the
stupefaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar
examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for lack
of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel to eclipse
"The Diamond Gate," I am absolutely certain that he had no doubt of his
capacity.

When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of guilt.
He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's work, the
beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self, the genius that
was Adrian Boldero. And yet, behind all this light-hearted enthusiasm,
must have run a vein of cunning, invariable symptom of an unbalanced
mind, which prompted secrecy, the secrecy which he had always loved to
practise, and inspired him with the idea of the mysterious, secret
room. The latter originated in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an
intellectual Bluebeard's chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken
wife would respect. It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into
the condemned cell.

As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in the midst
of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like
spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the
mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a
few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a