eek. The Baroness
was newly rankling under an insult now so many years of age; and
Annette, clearly visible at moments between the slits of the Venetian
blinds, was still pacing the lamplit salon. The whole thing happened in
his mind again precisely as it had happened in fact so very long ago.

A sudden remembrance and a sudden impulse moved him almost in the same
instant. When the bracelet had fallen from her arm, the Baroness had
cried out to the effect that it was her most valued treasure, and Paul
suddenly called to mind the fact that it still lay on the floor of the
salon. Annette might observe it at any moment, and might choose to wreak
her supposed offence upon it; and, thinking thus, he hastened back
to the apartment, prepared for any storm that might assail him. But
Annette, who, in the inexplicable changes of mood which affected her
at such times as these, was marching gaily up and down the room singing
'Tout le long de la route 'to a swinging rhythm, chose to disregard
him. He saw the precious ornament lying where it had fallen, possessed
himself of it, and passed out at the further door. For any sign she
gave Annette may not have seen him, and Paul had time, as he crossed the
corridor to his study, to remark upon a form of alcoholism which allowed
its victim unembarrassed speech in combination with a steady gait and an
entire irresponsibility of thought. The manifestation was comparatively
new to him, and he had spent some thought upon it It was so foreign
to the popular idea of drunkenness that it accounted to him for his
long-continued blindness to the truth.

He was tarred with the literary brush, which is to say that he was
eternally bent upon the examination of all human symptoms, whether
they displayed themselves in himself or in another. He had made it the
business of his life to analyze those symptoms, though he was but as
yet a chemist's apprentice, wandering and wondering through the vast
laboratory of the world. Yet, apprentice as he was, he had learned
enough of the secret of his own craft to know that the professional
analyst of emotion quickens perception at the expense of sensation. The
man who is always pulling emotion to pieces as a part of the day's work
grows to a philosophic indifference about it, as a vivisector becomes
dead to a sense of pain. Yet neither the anatomist of the living
soul nor the anatomist of the living body becomes insensible in any
appreciable degree to the exigence o