Turning a fresh page presently, his eyes wandered leisurely over the staring headlines, and came suddenly to a halt before a trivial item inserted among the Western news.  It was a brief notice of his divorced wife’s marriage, and to his amazement the announcement caused him an annoyance that was almost like the ghost of a retrospective jealousy.  It was quite evident to him that he did not want her for himself, yet he suffered a positive displeasure at the thought that she should now belong to another man.  After the ten years since they had separated was she still so “awfully splendid?” he wondered, had she kept her figure, which was long, athletic, with a military carriage, and did she still wear her hair in the fashion of a German omelette?  “Thank heaven I’m well out of it at any rate,” he commented with feeling.  “That comes of a man’s marrying before he’s twenty-five.  He’s turned cynic before he gets to forty”; and marriage appeared to him in his thoughts as a detestable and utterly boring institution, which interfered continually with a man’s freedom and exacted from him a perpetual sociability.  The most blissful sensation he had ever known, he told himself, was that of his recovered liberty; then his sincerity of nature compelled him to an honest contradiction—­he had known one emotion more blissful still and that was the madness which had prompted him to his unfortunate marriage.

Oh, he had been very much in love without a doubt! and while he sat peacefully drinking his two cups of coffee, eating his two eggs and his four pieces of toast with orange marmalade, he remembered, with a melancholy which in no wise affected his appetite, the first occasion upon which he had kissed the woman who had been his wife.  The memory of her tall, erect figure, with its dashing military carriage, aroused in him an agreeable and purely physical regret—­the kind of regret which is strong enough only to sweeten the knowledge of past pleasures; and he admitted with his accustomed frankness that if he had never kissed her again he should probably have continued to regard her with a charming, if impractical, sentiment.  But marriage had brushed off the bloom of that early romance; and as he recognised this, he felt a keen resentment against nature which had cheated him into believing that the illusion of love would not vanish at the first touch of reality.

He had lived upon the surface of things and the surface had contented if it had not satisfied him.  It had never entered his thoughts to question if he had had from life the best that it could offer, but he had sometimes wondered, in moments of nervous exasperation against small events, why it was that there could be no end under the sun to a man’s pursuit of the fugitive sensation.  When he looked back now over the breathless years of his life, he saw, almost with indignation, that whatever punishment fate had held in reserve for him, the avenger had inevitably appeared in the form his own gratified desire.