I do not like living.  It is thoroughly disagreeable.  Today Judith taunted me with never having lived, and I admitted the justice of the taunt and regretted in poignant misery the change from my old conditions.  If to live is to have one’s reason cast down and trampled under foot, one’s heart aflame with a besotted passion and one’s soul racked with remorse, then am I living in good sooth—­and I would far rather be dead and suffering the milder pains of Purgatory.  Men differently constituted get used to it, as the eels to skinning.  They say "mea culpa," “damn,” or "Kismet," according to their various traditions, and go forth comforted to their workaday pursuits.  I envy them.  I enter this exquisite Torture Chamber, and I shriek at the first twinge of the thumbscrew and faint at the preliminary embraces of the scavenger’s daughter.

I envy a fellow like Caesar Borgia.  He could murder a friend, seduce his widow, and rob the orphans all on a summer’s day, and go home contentedly to supper; and after a little music he could sleep like a man who has thoroughly earned his repose.  What manner of creatures are other men?  They area blank mystery to me; and I am writing—­or have been writing—­a sociological study of the most subtle generation of them that has ever existed!  I am an empty fool.  I know absolutely nothing.  I can no more account for the peaceful slumbers of that marvellous young man of five-and-twenty than I can predicate the priority of the first hen or the first egg.  I, with never a murder or a seduction or a robbery on my conscience, could not sleep last night.  I doubt whether I shall sleep to-night.  I feel as if I shall remain awake through the centuries with a rat gnawing my vitals.

So unhappy looking a woman as Judith, when I called on her early this forenoon, I have never beheld.  Gone was the elaborate coquetry of yesterday; gone the quiet roguishness of yesteryear; gone was all the Judith that I knew, and in her place stood a hollow-eyed woman shaking at gates eternally barred.

“I—­thought you would come this morning.  I had that lingering faith in you.”

“Your face haunted me all night,” I said.  “I was bound to come.”

“So, this is the end of it all,” she remarked, stonily.

“No,” said I.  “It only marks the transition from a very ill-defined relationship to as loyal a friendship as ever man could offer woman.”

She gave a quivering little shrug of disgust and turned away.

“Oh, don’t talk like that ’I can’t offer you bread, but I’ll give you a nice round polished stone.’  Friendship!  What has a woman like me got to do with friendship?”

“Have I ever given you much more?”

“God knows what you have given me,” she cried, bitterly.  She stared out of the window at the sodden street and murky air.  I went to her side and touched her wrist.

“For heaven’s sake, Judith, tell me what I can do.”