Without apology Romarin looked at his watch.

“All right,” said Marsden, smiling, “for what I’ve got out of life, then.  But I warn you, it’s entirely discreditable.”

Romarin did not doubt it.

“But it’s mine, and I boast of it.  I’ve done—­barring receiving honours and degrees—­everything—­everything!  If there’s anything I haven’t done, tell me and lend me a sovereign, and I’ll go and do it.”

“You haven’t told the story.”

“That’s so.  Here goes then ...  Well, you know, unless you’ve forgotten, how I began....”

Fruit and nutshells and nutcrackers lay on the table between them, and at the end of it, shielded from draughts by the menu cards, the coffee apparatus simmered over its elusive blue flame.  Romarin was taking the rind from a pear with a table-knife, and Marsden had declined port in favour of a small golden liqueur of brandy.  Every seat in the restaurant was now occupied, and the proprietor himself had brought his finest cigarettes and cigars.  The waiter poured out the coffee, and departed with the apparatus in one hand and his napkin in the other.

Marsden was already well into his tale...

The frightful unction with which he told it appalled Romarin.  It was as he had said—­there was nothing he had not done and did not exult in with a sickening exultation.  It had, indeed, ended in diabetes.  In the pitiful hunting down of sensation to the last inch he had been fiendishly ingenious and utterly unimaginative.  His unholy curiosity had spared nothing, his unnatural appetite had known no truth.  It was grinning sin.  The details of it simply cannot be told....

And his vanity in it all was prodigious.  Romarin was pale as he listened.  What!  In order that this malignant growth in Society’s breast should be able to say “I know,” had sanctities been profaned, sweet conventions assailed, purity blackened, soundness infected, and all that was bright and of the day been sunk in the quagmire that this creature of the night had called—­yes, stilled called—­by the gentle name of Romance?  Yes, so it had been.  Not only had men and women suffered dishonour, but manhood and womanhood and the clean institutions by which alone the creature was suffered to exist had been brought to shame.  And what was he to look at when it was all done?...

“Romance—­Beauty—­the Beauty of things as they are!” he croaked.

If faces in the restaurant were now turned to Romarin, it was the horror on Romarin’s own face that drew them.  He drew out his handkerchief and mopped his brow.

“But,” he stammered presently, “you are speaking of generalities—­horrible theories—­things diabolically conceivable to be done—­”

“What?” cried Marsden, checked for a moment in his horrible triumph.  “No, by God!  I’ve done ’em, done ’em!  Don’t you understand?  If you don’t, question me!...”

“No, no!” cried Romarin.