osaries,
indulgencies! My God! my God!" and he fell back in his armchair, and
did not speak again for a long time. Getting up suddenly, he said,
"If you want to smoke any more there are cigars on the table; I am
going to bed."

"Well, it is hard upon him," Ulick said as he took a cigar; and
lighting his candle, he wandered up the great green staircase by
himself, seeking the room he had been given at the end of one of the
long corridors.

XII

"Did it ever occur to you," Owen said one evening, as the men sat
smoking after dinner, after the servant had brought in the whisky
and seltzer, between eleven and twelve, in that happy hour when the
spirit descends and men and women sitting together are taken with a
desire to communicate the incommunicable part of themselves--"did it
ever occur to you," Owen said, blowing the smoke and sipping his
whisky and seltzer from time to time, "that man is the most
ridiculous animal on the face of this earth?"

"You include women?" Ulick asked.

"No, certainly not; women are not nearly so ridiculous, because they
are more instinctive, more like the animals which we call the lower
animals in our absurd self-conceit. As I have often said, women have
never invented a religion; they are untainted with that madness, and
they are not moralists. They accept the religions men invent, and
sometimes they become saints, and they accept our moralities--what
can they do, poor darlings, but accept? But they are not interested
in moralities, or in religions. How can they be? They are the
substance out of which life comes, whereas we are but the spirit, the
crazy spirit--the lunatic crying for the moon. Spirit and substance
being dependent one on the other, concessions have to be made; the
substance in want of the spirit acquiesces, says, 'Very well, I will
be religious and moral too.' Then the spirit and the substance are
married. The substance has been infected--"

"What makes you say all this, Asher?"

"Well, because I have just been thinking that perhaps my misfortunes
can be traced back to myself. Perhaps it was I who infected Evelyn."

"You?"

"Yes, I may have brought about a natural reaction. For years I was
speaking against religion to her, trying to persuade her; whereas if
I had let the matter alone it would have died of inanition, for she
was not really a religious woman."

"I see, I see," Ulick answered thoughtfully.

"Had she met you in the beginning," Owen continued, "sh