He had withheld his hand from nothing; the thing that he had wanted he had taken without question—­impulse and possession had flowed for him with a rhythmic regularity of movement—­and yet in glancing back he could place his finger upon no past events and say of them “this brought me happiness—­and this—­and this.”  In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap and threadbare—­woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions—­and he felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life, that he had been deluded into a childish yet irretrievable error.

As he sat there over his paper, he remembered his impatient early love, his ecstatic marriage, and then the long years during which he had lived, as he put it to himself, in a “mortal funk” of the divorce court.  Not moral obligation, but social cowardice, he admitted, had held him in a bondage from which his wife had at last liberated him by a single blow.  Well, it was all over! he heaved a sigh of relief, emptied his coffee cup, and dismissed the subject, with its oppressive train of associations, from his mind.

But his temperamental blitheness had suffered in the chill of recollection, and he frowned down upon the staring headlines which ornamented the open page before him.  His face, which recorded unerringly the slightest emotional change through which he passed, grew suddenly heavy and was over clouded by a momentary fit of gloom.  He had not seen, had hardly thought of his former wife, once in the ten years since their separation, yet he found almost to his annoyance that the mere printed letters of her name reinvoked her image from the darkness in which his sentimental skeletons were laid.  Two brief lines in a newspaper sufficed to produce her as an important factor in his present life.

And despite this she was nothing to him, had no proper business in his mind.  He tried to think of the other women whom he had loved and remembered, or of the more numerous ones still whom he had loved only to forget.  Well, he had lived a man’s life, and the deuce of it was that women should have come into it at all.  He had never wanted sentiment in the abstract, he told himself half angrily; he was bored to death by the deadly routine of what in his own mind he alluded to as “the business of love.”  It had always come to him without his sanction—­even against his will, and he had never failed to combat the feeling with shallow cynicism, to exhaust it speedily in racing motors.  There was no satisfaction in sentiment, of this he was quite convinced; and he remembered the voice of Madame Alta, with her peculiar high note of piercing sweetness, which entered like wine and honey into his blood.  The hold she still kept upon his senses through his memory was strengthened by the knowledge which fretted him to the admission that she had wearied first—­that while her fascination was still potent to work its spell upon him, she had fled in a half lyric, half devilish pursuit of the flesh she