With a choked sob he drained his brandy and told the waiter to bring him another.  There had been a period in his life when he had been able to find some measure of sentimental satisfaction in the stupor of drunkenness.  In those days, through the veil of illusion which alcohol had flung across his brain, he had been able to regard the contempt of the men as the intimacy of friendship, the scorn of the women as the laughter of light love.  But now drink gave him nothing but the mordant insight of morbidity, which cut through his rotten soul like cheese.  Yet night after night he came to this place, to be tortured afresh by the ridicule of the sordid frequenters, and by the careless music of the orchestra which told him of a flowerless spring and of a morning which held for him no hope.  For his last emotion rested in this self-inflicted pain; he could only breathe freely under the lash of his own contempt.

Idly he let his dull eyes stray about the room, from table to table, from face to face.  Many there he knew by sight, from none could he hope for sympathy or even companionship.  In his bitterness he envied the courage of the cowards who were brave enough to seek oblivion or punishment in death.  Dropping his eyes to his soft, unlovely hands, he marvelled that anything so useless should throb with life, and yet he realised that he was afraid of physical pain, terrified at the thought of death.  There were dim ancestors of his whose valour had thrilled the songs of minstrels and made his name lovely in the glowing folly of battles.  But now he knew that he was a coward, and even in the knowledge he could find no comfort.  It is not given to every man to hate himself gladly.

The music and the laughter beat on his sullen brain with a mocking insistence, and he trembled with impotent anger at the apparent happiness of humanity.  Why should these people be merry when he was miserable, what right had the orchestra to play a chorus of triumph over the stinging emblems of his defeat?  He drank brandy after brandy, vainly seeking to dull the nausea of disgust which had stricken his worn nerves; but the adulterated spirit merely maddened his brain with the vision of new depths of horror, while his body lay below, a mean, detestable thing.  Had he known how to pray he would have begged that something might snap.  But no man may win to faith by means of hatred alone, and his heart was cold as the marble table against which he leant.  There was no more hope in the world. . . .

When he came out of the cafe, the air of the night was so pure and cool on his face, and the lights of the square were so tender to his eyes, that for a moment his harsh mood was softened.  And in that moment he seemed to see among the crowd that flocked by a beautiful face, a face touched with pearls, and the inner leaves of pink rosebuds.  He leant forward eagerly.  “Christine!” he cried, “Christine!”

Then the illusion passed, and, smitten by the anger of the pitiless stars, he saw that he was looking upon a mere woman, a woman of the earth.  He fled from her smile with a shudder.