are always at the mercy of character.  I might have been wrong, I might have been right; no ethical argument could have bent my instinct.  I did not sympathize with myself—­I was too proud and stern—­but I sympathized with Frank.  I wished ardently that he might be consoled—­that his agony might not be too terrible.  I wondered where he was, what he was doing.  I had received no letter from him, but then I had instructed that letters should not be forwarded to me.  My compassion went out after him, followed him into the dark, found him (as I hoped), and surrounded him like an alleviating influence.  I thought pityingly of the ravage that had been occasioned by our love.  His home was wrecked.  Our lives were equally wrecked.  Our friends were grieved; they would think sadly of my closed flat.  Even the serio-comic figure of Emmeline touched me; I had paid her three months’ wages and dismissed her.  Where would she go with her mauve peignoir?  She was over thirty, and would not easily fall into another such situation.  Imagine Emmeline struck down by a splinter from our passionate explosion!  Only Yvonne was content at the prospect of revisiting France.

‘Ah!  Qu’on est bien ici, madame!’ she said, when we had fixed ourselves in the long and glittering train de grand luxe that awaited us at Calais.  Once I had enjoyed luxury, but now the futility of all this luxurious cushioned arrogance, which at its best only corresponded with a railway director’s dreams of paradise, seemed to me pathetic.  Could it detain youth, which is for ever flying?  Could it keep out sorrow?  Could it breed hope?  As the passengers, so correct in their travelling costumes, passed to and fro in the corridors with the subdued murmurs always adopted by English people when they wish to prove that they are not excited, I thought:  ’Does it matter how you and I go southwards?  The pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs, what can it help us that this should be sated?  We cannot leave our souls behind.’  The history of many of these men and women was written on their faces.  I wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the mirrors which were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had always seen.  Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response.  Was I not part of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life is good?  On every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh flowers that had been torn from the South, and would return there dead, having ministered to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is good.  I hated that.  I could almost have wished that I was travelling southwards in a slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate does not wear a mask.  Great grief is democratic, levelling—­not downwards but upwards.  It strips away the inessential, and makes brothers.  It is impatient with all the unavailing inventions which obscure the brotherhood of mankind.