fire.
Morning, the liquid morning of London summer, was unimaginable. He shut
the door of his room and flung himself down upon the bed. Contact with
the cool linen released the pent-up tears, and the fire within burnt
less fiercely as he cried. His surrender to self-pity must have lasted
half an hour. The pillow-case was drenched. His body felt battered. He
seemed to have recovered from a great illness. The quiet of the room
surprised him, as he looked round in a daze at the familiar objects. The
cataclysm of emotion so violently expressed had left him with a sense
that the force of his grief must have shaken the room as it had shaken
him. But everything was quiet; everything was the same. Now that he had
wept away that rending sense of powerlessness to aid her, he could
examine the future more calmly. Already the numbness was going, and the
need for action was beginning to make itself felt. Yet still all his
impulses were in confusion. He could not attain to any clear view of his
attitude.

He was not in love with her now. He was neither covetous of her kisses
nor in any way of her bodily presence. To his imagination at present she
appeared like one who has died. It seemed to him that he desired to
bring back a corpse, that over a lifeless form he wished to lament the
loss of beauty, of passion and of youth. But immediately afterward, so
constant was the impression of her as he had last known her, so utterly
incapable was Drake's account to change his outward picture of her, he
could not conceive the moral disintegration wrought by her shame. It
seemed to him that could he be driving with her in a hansom to-night,
she would lie still and fluttered in his arms, the Lily of five years
ago whom now to cherish were an adorable duty.

Therefore, he was in love with her. Otherwise to every prostitute in
London he must be feeling the same tenderness. Yet they were of no
account. Were they of no account? _C'est une douzaine de filles de
joie._ When he read Manon this morning--how strange! this morning he had
been reading Manon at Oxford--he was moved with pity for all poor light
women. And Lily was one of them. They did not banish them to New Orleans
nowadays, but she was not less an outcast. It was not because he was
still in love with her that he wished to find her. It was because he had
known her in the old days. He bore upon his own soul the damning weight
that in the past she had said, "_Michael, why do you make me love