e had met the unknown, but with the known--himself, her whole
life--beside her, and her ordeal was over. His, he felt now, was worse,
and already beginning. After all, he reflected, there was a certain
rough justice in it; the one spared longer in the world of bodily people
bore, in consequence, the reverting brunt of their double selfishness.
But the remnant of life seemed a poor thing to-night. The further it
stretched, in his suddenly stirred imagination, the poorer, the emptier,
it seemed.

And having stirred, after a whole lifetime of healthy sleep, his
imagination gripped him in a strong and merciless embrace. It seemed to
twist him about and force him to look down the vista of the coming years
and at all their possibilities, even the desecrational one of marrying
again and calling into life the son that he had never wanted before. At
the thought, he flushed with the idea that the portrait's eyes were
reading his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he
met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he
would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive
love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless
eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his
sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if
some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed the radiant
Medici Venus who smiled from the frame. He was seized by a desire to
turn the gazing picture to the wall.

Half-way across the room, he checked the impulse with a gasp of
self-disgust, but with hands raised involuntarily toward it he cried:

"_Oh, why didn't we?_"

As he stood trembling with his back to it, the second absurd temptation
of the night assailed him--to dash on his hat and go to Maurice's, a
restaurant of oblique reputation to which his wife had once accompanied
him out of curiosity, and which, in a surprising outburst of almost
pious prudery, she had refused to visit again. Nor had she ever allowed
him to go thereafter himself, and though she had made no dying request
of him, he knew that, if she had, that would have been it.

In his shaken state the thought of his one club, the Business Men's, was
repugnant. Maurice's, expansive, insinuating and brilliant, called to
his loneliness arbitrarily, persistently. But with a glance over his
shoulder at the portrait, he put the thought away. Then, straightening
up, he wa