ce.

Afterwards, his body, as he moved, touched Josephina, who seemed to be
asleep, and he felt a sort of repugnance as if he had rubbed against a
hostile creature.

She was his enemy; she had distorted and ruined his life as an artist,
she had saddened his life as a man. Now he believed that he might have
produced the most remarkable works, if he had not known that little
woman who crushed him with her weight. Her silent censure, her prying
eyes, that narrow, petty morality of a well-educated girl, blocked his
course and made him turn out of his way. Her fits of temper, her nervous
attacks, made him lose his bearings, belittling him, robbing him of his
strength for work. Must he always live like this? The thought of the
long years before him filled him with horror, the long road that life
offered him, monotonous, dusty, rough, without a shadow or a resting
place, a painful journey lacking enthusiasm and ardor, pulling at the
chain of duty, at the end of which dragged the enemy, always fretful,
always unjust, with the selfish cruelty of disease, spying on him with
searching eyes in the hours when his mind was off its guard, while he
slept, violating his secrecy, forcing his immobility, robbing him of his
most intimate ideas, only to parade them before his eyes later with the
insolence of a successful thief. And that was what his life was to be!
God! No, it was better to die.

Then in the black recesses of his brain there rose, like a blue spark of
infernal gleam, a thought, a desire, that made a chill of terror and
surprise run over his body.

"If she would only die!"

Why not? Always ill, always sad, she seemed to darken his mind with the
wings that beat ominously. He had a right to liberty, to break the
chain, because he was the stronger. He had spent his life in the
struggle for glory, and glory was a delusion, if it brought only cold
respect from his fellows, if it could not be exchanged for something
more positive. Many years of intense existence were left; he could still
exult in a host of pleasures, he could still live, like some artists
whom he admired, intoxicated with worldly joys, working in mad freedom.

"Oh, if she would only die!"

He recalled books he had read, in which other imaginary people had
desired another's death that they might be able to satisfy more fully
their appetites and passions.

Suddenly he felt as though he were awakening from a bad dream, as though
he were throwing off an over