“Once on a time, my dear,” said I, “I flattered myself on being an artist in life.  I am humbler now and acknowledge myself a wretched bungling amateur.  But I still recognise the value of chiaroscuro.”

“You’re hopeless,” said Agatha, somewhat crossly.  “You get more flippant and cynical every day.”

CHAPTER XX

I went home to my solitary dinner, and afterwards took down a volume of Emerson and tried to read.  I thought the cool and spacious philosopher might allay a certain fever in my blood.  But he did nothing of the kind.  He wrote for cool and spacious people like himself; not for corpses like me revivified suddenly with an overcharge of vital force.  I pitched him—­how much more truly companionable is a book than its author!—­I pitched him across the room, and thrusting my hands in my pockets and stretching out my legs, stared in a certain wonder at myself.

I, Simon de Gex, was in love; and, horribile dictu! in love with two women at once.  It was Oriental, Mormonic, New Century, what you will; but there it was.  I am ashamed to avow that if, at that moment, both women had appeared before me and said “Marry us,” I should have—­well, reflected seriously on the proposal.  I had passed through curious enough experiences, Heaven knows, already; but none so baffling as this.  The two women came alternately and knocked at my heart, and whispered in my ear their irrefutable claims to my love.  I listened throbbingly to each, and to each I said, “I love you.”

I was in an extraordinary psychological predicament.  Lola had remarked, “You are not quite alive even yet.”  I had come to complete life too suddenly.  This was the result.  I got up and paced the bird-cage, which the house-agents termed a reception-room, and wondered whether I were going mad.  It was not as if one woman represented the flesh and the other the spirit.  Then I might have seen the way to a decision.  But both had the large nature that comprises all.  I could not exalt one in any way to the abasement of the other.  All my inherited traditions, prejudices, predilections, all my training ranged me on the side of Eleanor.  I was clamouring for the real.  Was she not the incarnation of the real?  Her very directness piqued me to a perverse and delicious obliquity.  And I knew, as I knew when I parted from her months before, that it was only for me to awaken things that lay virginally dormant.  On the other hand stood Lola, with her magnetic seduction, her rich atmosphere, her great wide simplicity of heart, holding out arms into which I longed to throw myself.

It was monstrous, abnormal.  I hated the abominable indelicacy of weighing one against the other, as I had hated the idea of their meeting.

I paced my bird-cage until it shrank to the size of a rat-trap.  Then I clapped on my hat and fled down into the streets.  I jumped into the first cab I saw and bade the driver take me to Barbara’s Building.  Campion suddenly occurred to me as the best antidote to the poison that had entered my blood.