“It was in this very room I spoke to Lady Helen for the last time.  She understood very well indeed the utter worthlessness of life.  How beautiful was her death!  That white still face, with darkness stealing from the closed lids, a film of light shadow, symbol of deeper shadow.  The unseen but easily imagined hand grasping the pistol, the unseen but imagined red stain upon the soft texture of the chemise!  I might have loved her.  She saw into the heart of things, and like a reasonable being, which she was, resolved to rid herself of the burden.  We discussed the whole question in the next room; and I remember I was surprised to find that she was in no wise deceived by the casual fallacy of the fools who say that the good times compensate for the bad.  Ah! how little they understand!  Pleasure! what is it but the correlative of pain?  Nothing short of man’s incomparable stupidity could enable him to distinguish between success and failure.

“But now I remember she did not die for any profound belief in the worthlessness of life, but merely on account of a vulgar love affair.  That letter was quite conclusive.  It was written from the Alexandra Hotel.  It was a letter breaking it off (strange that any one should care to break off with Lady Helen!); she stopped to see him, in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation.  Quite a Bank Holiday sort of incident!  She did not deny life; but only that particular form in which life had come to her.  Under such circumstances suicide is unjustifiable.

“There!  I’m breaking into what John Norton would call my irrepressible levity.  But there is little gladness in me.  Ennui hunts me like a hound, loosing me for a time, but finding the scent again it follows—­I struggle—­escape—­but the hour will come when I shall escape no more.  If Lily had not died, if I had married her, I might have lived.  In truth, I’m not alive, I’m really dead, for I live without hope, without belief, without desire.  Ridiculous as a wife and children are when you look at them from the philosophical side, they are necessary if man is to live; if man dispenses with the family, he must embrace the cloister; John has done that; but now I know that man may not live without wife, without child, without God!”

* * * * * *

Next day, after breakfast, he lay in his arm-chair, thinking of the few hours that lay between him and the fall of night.  He sought to tempt his jaded appetite with many assorted dissipations, but he turned from all in disgust, and gambling became his sole distraction.  Every evening about eleven he was seen in Piccadilly, going towards Arlington Street, and every morning about four the street-sweepers saw him returning home along the Strand.  Then, afraid to go to bed, he sometimes took pen and paper and attempted to write some lines of his long-projected poem.  But he found that all he had to say he had said in the sketch which he found among his papers.  The idea did not seem to him to want any further amplification, and he sat wondering if he could ever have written three or four thousand lines on the subject.