She turned swimming eyes on me.

“You are good, Marcus—­after what I have told you—­you do not feel bitterly against me?”

“For what?  For being quixotic?  For going to martyrdom for an ideal?”

“You did not listen when I spoke about Carlotta?”

“Oh, my dear!” said I.

And now she has gone.  We kissed at parting—­a kiss of remembrance and renunciation.  Shall we ever meet again?

Darkness gathers round me, and I am tired, tired, and I would that I could sleep like Rip Van Winkle, and awake an old man, with an old man’s passionless resignation; or better, awake not at all.  Such poor fools as I are better dead.

I look back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them.  All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent.  Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom.  So I forbear to judge her now.

If I had loved Judith with the great passion of a man’s love for woman, not all the converted rascals in Christendom could have come between us.

And her seeing Carlotta—­poor woman—­what does it matter?  What did she say about Carlotta?  “She laughed and threw stones at a little dog.”

Oh, my God!

November 12th

This way madness lies.  I will leave the house in charge of Stenson and Antoinette and go abroad.  Something has put Verona into my head.  One place is as good as another, so long as it is not this house—­this house of death and madness and crime—­and Verona is in Italy, where I have always found peace.

I will confess my madness.  This book is a record of my morals —­the finished version of the farce the high gods have called on meto play.  I thought last night the curtain was rung down.  I was wrong.  Listen, and laugh as I do—­if you can.

I fixed myself to work to-day.  After all, I am not an idler.  I earn my right to live.  When I publish my History the world will be the richer by something, poor though it may be.  I vow I have been more greatly, more nobly employed of late years, than I was when I earned my living at school-slavery teaching to children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures—­elementary mathematics.  There is no more reason for any human being on God’s earth to be acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of Triangles—­unless he is a professional scientist, when he can begin to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer begins to specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy—­than for him to be an expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon.  I look back with feelings of shame and degradation