But he had never found Grosse so bearish and difficult before this visit to Como.  As a rule Edmund was suavity itself, but this time even his gift of gently, almost imperceptibly, making every woman feel him to be her admirer was failing.  How often he had been the life of any party in any class of society, and that not by starting amusements, not by any power of initiation, but by a gift for making others feel pleased, first with themselves, and consequently with life.  He could bring the gift to good use on a royal yacht, at a Bohemian supper party, at a schoolroom tea, or at a parish mothers’ meeting.  But now—­and he owned that his liver was out of order—­he was suffering from a general disgust with things.  When still a young man in the Foreign Office he had succeeded to a large fortune, and it had seemed then thoroughly worth while to employ it for social ends and social joys.  Long ago he had attained those ends, and long ago he had become bored with those joys; and yet he could not shake himself free from any of the habits of body or mind he had got into during those years.  He could not be indifferent to any shades of failure or success.  He watched the temperature of his popularity as acutely as many men watch their bodily symptoms.  Even during those days at Como, though despising his company, he knew that he felt a distinct irritation in a preference for Billy on the part of a lady whom he had at one time honoured with his notice.  In arriving where he was in the English social world, he had increased, not only the need for luxury of body, but the sensitiveness and acuteness of certain perceptions as to his fellow creatures, and these perceptions were not likely to slumber again.

Edmund was oppressed by several unpleasant thoughts as well as by the heat of the night on which he arrived in Florence.  He decided to sleep out in the wide brick loggia of the flat, which was nearly at the top of the great building.  There was nothing to distract his gloomy thoughts from himself, not even a defect in the dinner or in the broad couch of a bed from which he could look up between the brick pillars of the loggia at the naked stars.  If he had been younger he would, in his sleepless hours, have owned to himself that he was suffering from “what men call love,” but he could not believe easily that Edmund Grosse at forty was as silly as any boy of twenty.  He pished and pshawed at the absurdity.  He could not accept anything so simple and goody as his own story.  That ever since Rose married he had put her out of his thought from very love and reverence for her seemed an absurd thing to say of a man of his record.  Yet it was true; and all the more in consequence did the thought of Rose as a free woman derange his whole inner life now, while the thought of Rose insulted by the dead hand of the man she had married was gall and wormwood.  What must Rose think of men?  She had been so anxious to find a great and good man; and she had found