“What a damned fool I made of myself,” he confessed, as he walked rapidly away from Gramercy Park.  “I got no pleasure from seeing Jennie Alta—­not an atom of enjoyment even—­and yet I’ve ruined my whole life because of her, and the chances are nine to one that if I had it to go over I’d act the same blooming idiot again.  And all the time I’m more in love with Laura than I’ve ever been with any woman in my life.  Here’s the whole happiness of my future swept away at a single blow.”

And the domestic dream which Madame Alta had destroyed was mapped out for him by his imagination, until she seemed, not only to have prevented his marriage, but, by some singular eccentricity of feeling, to have murdered the son who had played so large a part in his confident expectations.

“But why should this have happened to me when I’m no worse than other men?” he questioned, “when I’m even better than a hundred whom I know?  I’ve never willingly harmed any human being in my life—­I’ve never cheated, I’ve never lied to get myself out of a tight place, I’ve never breathed a word against the reputation of any woman.”  He thought of Brady, who, although he was a cad and had ruined Connie Adams, was now reconciled with his wife and received everywhere he went; of Perry Bridewell whose numerous affairs had never interfered with either his domestic existence or his appetite.  Beside either of these men he felt himself to glow inwardly with virtue, yet he saw that his greater decency had not in the least prevented his receiving the larger punishment; and it seemed to him that he must be pursued by some malign destiny because, though he was so much better than Brady or Perry Bridewell, he should have been overtaken by a retribution which they had so easily escaped.  An unreasonable anger against Laura pervaded his thoughts, but this very anger lent fervour to the admiration he now felt for her.  He knew she loved him and if—­as in the case of no other woman he had ever known—­her love could be dominated and subdued by her recognition of what was due her honour, his feeling rather than his thought, assured him that he would be reduced to a moral submission approaching the abject.  Though he hoped passionately that she would yield, he realised in his heart that he would adore her if she remained implacable.  Love is not always pleased with reverence, but reverence, he saw dimly through some pathetic instinct for virtue, is the strongest possible hold that love can claim.  He, himself, would always live in the external world of the senses, yet deep within him, half smothered by the clouds of his egoism, there was still a blind recognition of that other world beyond sense which he had shut out.  To this other world, for the time at least, Laura, with all the enchantment of the distance, appeared to belong.