But the sly incarnate devil which lurked in Adams in the form of an ironic spirit asserted itself with an explosion which shook the plethoric gravity with which Perry contemplated an orgy of indigestion.  The universal scheme appeared planned to fulfil the law of a Titanic humour, and his own credulity and Connie’s indiscretions showed suddenly to Adams as mere mote-like jests which circled in a general convulsion of Nature’s irony.

“Well, you are a capital fellow,” he stammered, after a moment, while the spasm of his unholy laughter rocked him from head to foot.  “I—­I’d like it of all things—­but I can’t.  The fact is it is all so funny—­the whole business of life.”

Even as he uttered the words he realised that to Perry they would convey an infamous lightness, but at the thought his hysterical humour redoubled in its energy.  It was as if he stood outside—­afar off—­and watched as a god the little tangled eccentricities of earth.  And they were little, even though Perry should continue to regard the situation with such large magnificence.

By the time, however, that he had parted from Perry Bridewell and turned in at his own door, the gravity of the occasion had grown almost oppressive in his reflections.  Connie had gone an hour before—­he was too late to have detained her upon a pretext—­and while sitting speechless before the dinner he could not eat—­his heated imagination wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a spider’s web.  What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally?  What if he missed her at the entrance to the opera?  Or what if—­most desperate supposition—­she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse to accept his manufactured excuse to recall her home?  She was capable, he knew, of any recklessness, but he had never for an instant conceived her as walking open eyed into dishonour, and he felt again the awful, if partly comforting conviction that she was not herself—­that an infernal drug was working in her and bending her to some particular uses of the devil.  Why had she wasted her beauty and even her life? he wondered bitterly—­and did the moment’s mad exhilaration compensate for the slow deliberate eating away of her moral consciousness?  He recalled again the violent flutter of her manner, the excitement as of intoxication in her voice, the yellow tinge which had crept gradually over the ivory of her skin; her spasmodic movements and the ineffectual lies which deluded neither of them for an instant.  The tragedy of life rose before him as vividly as the humour of it had done an hour ago—­a tragedy which was hideous because it was ignoble, in which there was neither the beauty of resignation nor the sublimity of defiance.  Had there been the least—­even the smallest redeeming honesty in the situation he felt that he might have faced it, if not with positive sympathy yet with a tolerant, a merciful comprehension.  Love he might have understood—­for women needed it, he knew, and he was burdened by no delusion concerning the place he occupied in Connie’s horizon.  But before the breathless chase of excitement in which she lived, the frenzied invocation of pleasure that filled her thoughts, he found himself groping blindly for some meaning which would explain the thing it could not justify.