He sympathized with Simon.

‘Yes, sir.’

He thought he would take a stroll on the roof; it might calm his nerves....  Foolishness!  How much wiser to take a sedative!

Then he turned to the Montaigne, and after he had glanced at various pages, his eye encountered a sentence in italics:  ’Wisdome hath hir excesses, and no lesse need of moderation, than follie.’

‘True,’ he murmured.

He dressed, and went out.

CHAPTER X

THE COFFIN

He was in that mental condition, familiar to every genuine man of action, in which, though the mind divides against itself, and there is an apparently even conflict between two impulses, the battle is lost and won before it is fought, and the fight is nothing but a sham fight.  He wandered about the roofs; he went as far as the restaurant garden, and turned on all the electric festoons and standards by the secret switch, and sat down solitary at a table before an empty glass which a waiter had forgotten to remove.  He extinguished the lights, wandered back to the dome, climbed to the topmost gallery, and saw the moon rising over St. Paul’s Cathedral.  He said he would go to bed again at once, well knowing that he would not go to bed again at once.  He swore that he would conquer the overmastering impulse, well knowing that it would conquer him.  He cursed, as men only curse themselves.  And then, suddenly, he yielded, gladly, with relief.

He hastened out, and did not pause till he reached the balcony of flat No. 7 in the further quadrangle.  He admitted frankly now that the dominant impulse which controlled his mind would force him to enter the flat during that night, by means lawful or unlawful, and he perceived with satisfaction that the great French window of the drawing-room was not quite shut.  The blinds, however, had been carefully lowered, and nothing of the interior was revealed save the fact that a light burned within.  In the entire quadrangle, round which, tier above tier, hundreds of people were silent in sleep or in vigil, this was the sole illumination.  Hugo leaned over the balcony, and tried to pierce the depths of the vast pit below, and those thoughts came to him which come to watchers by night in the presence of sleeping armies, or on the high sea.  The eternal and insoluble question troubled and teased him, and would not be put aside.  In imagination, he felt the very swish of the planet as it whirled through space with its cargo of pitiful humanity.  What, after all, were life, love, ambition, grief, death?  What, in the incessant march of suns, could be the value of a few restless specks of vitality clinging with desperation to a minor orb?