It is two o’clock.  I must go to sleep.  I take from my shelves Epictetus, who might be expected to throw cold water on the most burning fever of the mind.  I have not read far before I come across this consolatory apophthegm:  “The contest is unequal between a charming girl and a beginner in philosophy.”  He is mocking me, the cold-blooded pedagogue!  I throw his book across the room.  But he is right.  I am but a beginner in philosophy.  No armour wherein my reason can invest me is of avail against Carlotta.  I have no strength to smite.  I am helpless.

But by heaven!  Am I mad?  Is not this on the contrary the sanest hour of my existence?  I have lived like an automaton for forty years, and I suddenly awake to find myself a man.  I don’t care whether I sleep or not.  I feel gloriously, exultingly young.  I am but twenty.  As I have never lived, I have never grown old.  Life translates itself into music—­a wild “Invitation to the Waltz” by some Archangel Weber.  I laugh out loud.  Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta’s corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops.  Heigh, old boy?  Do the pulsations of the music throb in your veins, too?  Come along and let us make a night of it.  To the Devil with sleep.  We’ll go together down to the cellar and find a bottle of Pommery, and we will drink to Life and Youth and Love and the Splendour and the Joy thereof.

He utters a little cry of delight and frisks around me.  In the blackness of the cellar his one eye gleams like a star and he purrs unutterable rapture.  My hand passed over his back produces a shower of sparks.  We return up the silent stairs, I carry a bottle of Pommery and a milkjug—­for you shall revel, too, Polyphemus; and as I have forgotten to bring a saucer, you shall drink, as no cat has drunk before, from an old precious platter bearing the arms of the Estes of Ferrara—­over which Lucrezia Borgia laughed when the world was young.  It is a pity cats don’t drink champagne.  I would have made you to-night as drunk as Bacchus.  We drink, and in the stillness the glouglou of his tongue forms a bass to the elfin notes of the Pommery in the soda-water tumbler.

Ha!  Twin purveyors of the milk of paradise, I wonder like Omar what you buy one-half so precious as the stuff you sell.  Motor-cars for Mrs. Pommery and cakes for the little Grenos?  I do not like to regard you as common humans addicted to silk hats and umbrellas and the other vices of respectability.  Ye are rather beneficent demigods, Castor and Pollux of the vine, dream entities who pour from the sunset lands of Nowhere the liquid gold of life’s joyousness.