If he lived on he must live for himself; he must reverse all his rules of conduct; he must fling himself into the life of self-gratification.  He had come to believe that the men who trample are the men who succeed and who have the happiest lives.  Sensitiveness does not pay; loving consideration of others brings no real reward; men do not get what they give.  It is the hard and the passionate man who is the victor in life, not the man who is tender, thoughtful, even unselfish in the midst of his passion.  Self-control—­what a reward Dion had received for the self-control of his youth!

If he lived he would cast it away.

He sat at his window till dawn, till the sea woke and the hills of Asia were visible under a clear and delicate sky.  He leaned out and felt the atmosphere of beginning that is peculiar to the first hour of daylight.  Could he begin again?  It seemed impossible.  Yet now he felt he could not deprive himself of life.  Suicide is a cowardly act, even though a certain kind of courage must prompt the pulling of the trigger, the insertion of the knife, or the pouring between the lips of the poison.  Dion had not the courage of that cowardice, or the cowardice of that courage.  Perhaps, without knowing it, in deciding to live he was only taking one more step on the road whose beginning he had seen in Elis, as he waited alone outside of the house where Hermes watched over the child; was saving the distant Rosamund from a stroke which would pierce through her armor even though she knelt before the throne of God.  But he was conscious only of the feeling that he could not kill himself, though he did not know why he could not.  The capacity for suicide evidently was not contained in his nature.  He rejected the worm of Izrail; he rejected, too, the other death.  He must, then, live.

He washed and lay down on his bed.  And directly he lay down he wondered why he had been sitting up and mentally debating a great question.  For in the Valley of Roses he had surely decided it before he spoke to Sir Carey Ingleton.  When he said he would visit Lady Ingleton he must have decided.  That visit would mean the return to what is called normal life, the exit from the existence of a castaway, the entrance into relations with his kind.  He dreaded that visit, but he meant to pay it.  In paying it he would take his first step away from the death that walks in form of life.

He could not sleep, and soon he got up again and went to the window.  A gust of wind came to him from the sea.  It seemed to hint at a land that was cold, and he thought of Russia, and then again of the distant places in which he might lose himself, places in which no one would know who he was, or trouble about the past events of his life.  There before him was Asia rising out of the dawn.  He had only to cross a narrow bit of sea and a continent was ready to receive him and to hide him.  So he had thought of Africa on many a night as he sat in the Hotel des Colonies at Marseilles.  But he had not crossed to Africa.