Suddenly, inclining his head, he withdrew a little from the door-jamb.  The wandering draught caused the door to move a little on its hinges.  Oleron trembled violently, stood for a moment longer, and then, putting his hand out to the knob, softly drew the door to, sat down on the nearest chair, and waited, as a man might await the calling of his name that should summon him to some weighty, high and privy Audience....

XI

One knows not whether there can be human compassion for anemia of the soul.  When the pitch of Life is dropped, and the spirit is so put over and reversed that that only is horrible which before was sweet and worldly and of the day, the human relation disappears.  The sane soul turns appalled away, lest not merely itself, but sanity should suffer.  We are not gods.  We cannot drive out devils.  We must see selfishly to it that devils do not enter into ourselves.

And this we must do even though Love so transfuse us that we may well deem our nature to be half divine.  We shall but speak of honour and duty in vain.  The letter dropped within the dark door will lie unregarded, or, if regarded for a brief instant between two unspeakable lapses, left and forgotten again.  The telegram will be undelivered, nor will the whistling messenger (wiselier guided than he knows to whistle) be conscious as he walks away of the drawn blind that is pushed aside an inch by a finger and then fearfully replaced again.  No:  let the miserable wrestle with his own shadows; let him, if indeed he be so mad, clip and strain and enfold and couch the succubus; but let him do so in a house into which not an air of Heaven penetrates, nor a bright finger of the sun pierces the filthy twilight.  The lost must remain lost.  Humanity has other business to attend to.

For the handwriting of the two letters that Oleron, stealing noiselessly one June day into his kitchen to rid his sitting-room of an armful of fetid and decaying flowers, had seen on the floor within his door, had had no more meaning for him than if it had belonged to some dim and faraway dream.  And at the beating of the telegraph-boy upon the door, within a few feet of the bed where he lay, he had gnashed his teeth and stopped his ears.  He had pictured the lad standing there, just beyond his partition, among packets of provisions and bundles of dead and dying flowers.  For his outer landing was littered with these.  Oleron had feared to open his door to take them in.  After a week, the errand lads had reported that there must be some mistake about the order, and had left no more.  Inside, in the red twilight, the old flowers turned brown and fell and decayed where they lay.