“I shudder when I think of the new evils and abominations that this day will bring.  The world is still at rest, lying in the partial purity of sleep.  But as a cruel gray beast the day comes on soundless velvet paws.  Light and desire are one; light and desire are the claws that the gray beast unsheathes; a few hours’ oblivion and the world’s torment begins again!” Then looking down the great height, he thought how he might spring from consciousness into oblivion—­the town and the river were now distinct in ghastly pallor—­“I should feel nothing.  But what a mess I should make; what a horrible little mess!”

After breakfast he sat looking into space, wondering what he might do.  He hoped for a visitor, and yet he could not think of one that he desired to see.  A woman! the very thought was distasteful.  He rose and went to the window.  London implacable lay before him, a morose mass of brick, fitting sign and symbol of life.  And the few hours that lay between breakfast and dinner were narrow and brick-coloured; and longing for the vast green hours of the country, he went to Belthorpe Park.  But in a few weeks the downs and lanes fevered and exasperated him, and perforce he must seek some new distraction.  Henceforth he hurried from house to house, tiring of each last abode more rapidly than the one that had preceded it.  He read no books, and he only bought newspapers to read the accounts of suicides; and his friends had begun to notice the strange interest with which he spoke of those who had done away with themselves, and the persistency with which he sought to deduce their motives from the evidence; and he seemed to be animated by a wish to depreciate all worldly reasons, and to rely upon weariness of life as sufficient motive for their action.

The account of two young people engaged to be married, who had taken tickets for some short journey and shot themselves in the railway carriage.  “Here,” he said, “was a case of absolute sanity, a quality almost undiscoverable in human nature.  Two young people resolve to rid themselves of the burden; but they are more than utilitarians, they are poets, and of a high order; for, not only do they make most public and emphatic denial of life, but they add to it a measure of Aristophanesque satire—­they engage themselves to marry.  Now marriage is man’s approval and confirmation of his belief in human existence—­they engage themselves to marry, but instead of putting their threat into execution, they enter a railway carriage and blow out their brains, proving thereby that they had brains to blow out.”

When, however, it transpired that letters were found in the pockets of the suicides to the effect that they had hoped to gain such notoriety as the daily press can give by their very flagrant leave-taking of this world, Mike professed much regret, and gravely assured his astonished listeners that, in the face of these letters which had unhappily come to light, he withdrew his praise of the quality of the brains