night and day; it hushes one to sleep, and wakes one up. On all but the
strongest minds it casts a narcotizing spell, so that thought is
arrested, and originality, vivacity, individuality become a crime--a
shame that must be hidden. Into this strange organism I took my wounded
heart, imagining that an atmosphere of coma might help to heal it. But
no! Within a week my state had become such that I could have cried out in
mid Union Street at noon: 'Look at me with your dead eyes, you dead who
have omitted to get buried, I am among you, and I am an adulteress in
spirit! And my body has sinned the sin! And I am alive as only grief can
be alive. I suffer the torture of vultures, but I would not exchange my
lot with yours!'

And one morning, after a fortnight, I thought of Monte Carlo. And the
vision of that place, which I had never seen, too voluptuously lovely to
be really beautiful, where there are no commandments, where
unconventionality and conventionality fight it out on even terms, where
the adulteress swarms, and the sin is for ever sinned, and wounded hearts
go about gaily, where it is impossible to distinguish between virtue and
vice, and where Toleration in fine clothes is the supreme social
goddess--the vision of Monte Carlo, as a place of refuge from the
exacerbating and moribund and yet eternal demureness of Torquay, appealed
to me so persuasively that I was on my way to the Riviera in two hours.
In that crisis of my life my moods were excessively capricious. Let me
say that I had not reached Exeter before I began to think kindly of
Torquay. What was Torquay but an almost sublime example of what the
human soul can accomplish in its unending quest of an ideal?

I left England on a calm, slate-coloured sea--sea that more than any
other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes
wonderful the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me
the mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters
of the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical
curiosity concerning each other, and then, mutually forgotten, took wing,
and spread out into the unknown. I think that as I stood near the hot
funnel, breasting the wind, and vacantly staring at the smooth expanse
that continually slipped from under us, I understood myself better than I
had done before. My soul was at peace--the peace of ruin after a
conflagration, but peace. Sometimes a little flame would d