I wonder if the Devil, having grown infirm, is mixing up his centuries and mistaking me for a mediaeval saint?  Paphnutius for instance, who was visited by such a seductress.  What is the legend?  To get rid of her he burns off his hand, whereupon she falls dead.  He prays and she returns to life and becomes a nun.  No, Messer Diavolo, I am not Paphnutius.  I will not maim myself, nor do I want Carlotta to fall dead; and I cannot pray and effect a pietistic resurrection.  I am simply a fool of a modern man tempted out of his wits, who scarce knows what it is that he speaks or writes.

I am not superstitious, but I feel myself to-night on the brink of some disaster.  I walk restlessly about the room.  On the mantel-piece are three photographs in silver frames:  Judith, Carlotta, Pasquale.  That which is of mockery in the spirit of each seems to-night to be hovering round the portraits and to be making sport of me.  An autumn gale is howling among the trees outside, like a legion of lost souls.  Listen.  Messer Diavolo himself might be riding by with a whoop of derision.

CHAPTER XV

October 26th.

I knew something would happen.  Messer Diavolo does not ride whooping to no purpose by the windows of people whom he desires to torment; nor does he inspire photographs for nothing with an active spirit of mockery.

We dined at the Trocadero.  Carlotta loves the band and the buzz of Babel and the heavy scents and the clatter and the tumult and the glare of light; otherwise I should have chosen a discreeter hostelry where the footfalls of the waiting-men were noiseless and the walls in quiet shadow, where there was nothing but the mellow talk of friends to distract the mind from the consideration of exquisite flavours.  But in these palaces of clashing splendour, the stunned brain fails to receive impressions from the glossopharyngeal nerve, and one eats unthinkingly like a dog.  But this matters little to Carlotta.  Perhaps when I was nineteen it mattered little to me.  And to-night, also, it mattered little, for my mind was preoccupied and a dinner with Lucullus would have been savourless.

If the Psalmist cried, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” what cry had he at the back of his head to utter concerning woman?  Did he leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his “Theory of Sexual Selection”?  Or did he in the good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity?  If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed the very fount of human tears.