But why should I be mad?  For filling my soul with God’s utmost glory of earth and sea and sky?  For filling my heart with purest pleasure in the intimate companionship of fresh and fragrant maidenhood?  For giving myself up for once to a dream of sense clouded by never a thought that was not serenely fair?

For feeling young again?

I shall read myself to sleep with La Dame de Monsoreau, which I have procured from the circulating library in the Rue Alphonse Karr—­(the literary horticulturist is the genius loci and the godfather of my landlady)—­and I will empty flagons with Pere Gorenflot and ride on errands of life and death with Chicot, prince of jesters, and walk lovingly between the valiant Bussy and Henri Quatre.  By this, if by nothing else, I recognise the beneficence of the high gods—­they have given us tired men Dumas.

CHAPTER XIII

September 30th.

Something is wrong with Antoinette.  The dinner she served up this evening was all but uneatable.  Something is wrong with Stenson, who has taken to playing his lugubrious hymn-tunes on the concertina while I am in the house; I won’t have it.  Something is wrong with the cat.  He wanders round the house like a lost soul, sniffing at everything.  This evening he actually jumped onto the dinner-table, looked at me out of his one eye, in which all the desolation of two was concentrated, and miaowed heart-rendingly in my face.  Something is wrong with the house, with my pens which will not write, with my books which have the air of dry bones in a charnel-house, with the MS. of my History of Renaissance Morals, which stands on the writing-table like a dusty monument to the futility of human endeavour.  Something is wrong with me.

Something, too, is wrong with Judith, who has just returned from her stay with the Willoughbys.  I have been to see her this evening and found her of uncertain temper, and inclined to be contradictious.  She accused me of being dull.  I answered that the autumn world outside was drenched with miserable rain.  How could man be sprightly under such conditions?

“In this room,” said Judith, “with its bright fire and drawn curtains there is no miserable rain, and no autumn save in our hearts.”

“Why in our hearts?” I asked.

“How you peg one down to precision,” said Judith, testily.  “I wish I were a Roman Catholic.”

“Why?”

“I could go into a convent.”

“You had much better go to Delphine Carrere,” said I.

“I have only been back a day, and you want to get rid of me already?” she cried, using her woman’s swift logic of unreason.

“I want you to be happy and contented, my dear Judith.”

“H’m,” she said.

Her slipper dangling as usual from the tip of her foot fell to the ground.  I declare I was only half conscious of the accident as my mind was deep in other things.