Then a fresh wave, a raging wave of humiliation, swept through his mind, and left nothing there but a personal sense of undeserved abasement.  Why should he be mixed up with such a horrid exposure!  It annihilated all the advantages of his well-ordered past, by a truth effective and unjust like a calumny—­and the past was wasted.  Its failure was disclosed—­a distinct failure, on his part, to see, to guard, to understand.  It could not be denied; it could not be explained away, hustled out of sight.  He could not sit on it and look solemn.  Now—­if she had only died!

If she had only died!  He was driven to envy such a respectable bereavement, and one so perfectly free from any taint of misfortune that even his best friend or his best enemy would not have felt the slightest thrill of exultation.  No one would have cared.  He sought comfort in clinging to the contemplation of the only fact of life that the resolute efforts of mankind had never failed to disguise in the clatter and glamour of phrases.  And nothing lends itself more to lies than death.  If she had only died!  Certain words would have been said to him in a sad tone, and he, with proper fortitude, would have made appropriate answers.  There were precedents for such an occasion.  And no one would have cared.  If she had only died!  The promises, the terrors, the hopes of eternity, are the concern of the corrupt dead; but the obvious sweetness of life belongs to living, healthy men.  And life was his concern:  that sane and gratifying existence untroubled by too much love or by too much regret.  She had interfered with it; she had defaced it.  And suddenly it occurred to him he must have been mad to marry.  It was too much in the nature of giving yourself away, of wearing—­if for a moment—­your heart on your sleeve.  But every one married.  Was all mankind mad!

In the shock of that startling thought he looked up, and saw to the left, to the right, in front, men sitting far off in chairs and looking at him with wild eyes—­emissaries of a distracted mankind intruding to spy upon his pain and his humiliation.  It was not to be borne.  He rose quickly, and the others jumped up, too, on all sides.  He stood still in the middle of the room as if discouraged by their vigilance.  No escape!  He felt something akin to despair.  Everybody must know.  The servants must know to-night.  He ground his teeth . . .  And he had never noticed, never guessed anything.  Every one will know.  He thought:  “The woman’s a monster, but everybody will think me a fool”; and standing still in the midst of severe walnut-wood furniture, he felt such a tempest of anguish within him that he seemed to see himself rolling on the carpet, beating his head against the wall.  He was disgusted with himself, with the loathsome rush of emotion breaking through all the reserves that guarded his manhood.  Something unknown, withering and poisonous, had entered his life, passed near him, touched him, and he was