to the days when, for the sake of a crust of bread, I prostituted my intelligence to wasting the precious hours of impressionable childhood, which could have been filled with so many beautiful and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and inhuman subject.  It trains the mind—­it teaches boys to think, they say.  It doesn’t.  In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit into a school curriculum.  Its sacrosanctity saves educationalists an enormous amount of trouble, and its chief use is to enable mindless young men from the universities to make a dishonest living by teaching it to others, who in their turn may teach it to a future generation.

I am mad to-night—­why have I indulged in this diatribe against mathematics?  I must find some vent, I suppose.  I see now.  I was saying that I earned my right to live, that I am not an idler.  I cling strenuously to the claim.  A man cannot command respect, even his own, by the mere reason of his vie sentimentale.  And, after what I have done to-day, I must force my claim to the respect which on other grounds I have forfeited.

I spent, then, my day in unremitting toil.  But this evening the horrible craving for her came over me.  Such a little thing brought it about.  Antoinette, who disapproves of the amorphous British lumps of sugar, has found some emporium where she can buy the regular parallelopiped of the Continent, and these she provides for my afterdinner coffee.  Absent-mindedly I dipped the edge of the piece of sugar into the liquid, before dropping it, and watched the brown moisture rise through the white crystals.  Then I remembered.  It was an invariable practice of Carlotta’s.  She would keep the lump in the coffee to saturation-point between her fingers, and then hastily put it into her mouth, so that it should not crumble to pieces on the way.  If it did, there would be much laughter and wiping of skirts; and there would be a search through my dinner-jacket pockets for a handkerchief to dry the pink tips of her fingers.  She called the dripping lump a canard, like the French children.  It was such a trivial thing; but it brought back with a rush all the thousand dainty, foolish, captivating intimacies that made up the maddening charm of Carlotta.

Yes, I am aware that there is no language spoken under heaven that can fitly express the doting folly of a man who can be driven mad by a piece of sugar soaked in coffee.  There is a ghastly French phrase not to be found in Lamartine, Chateaubriand, or any of the polite sentimentalists avoir les sangs tournes de quelqu’un.  It is so with me. J’ai les sangs tournes d’elle.  Somebody has said something somewhere about the passion of a man of forty.  It must have to do with the French phrase.

I pushed my coffee aside untasted, and buried my head in my hands, longing, longing; eating my heart out for her.  The hours passed.  When the servants were abed, I stole upstairs to her room, left as it was on the night when Antoinette, hoping against hope, had prepared it for her reception.  I broke down.  Heaven knows what I did.