should be athrill with the joy
and the flame of youth! I should laugh and sing! I should perform the
happy antics of love's exuberance! I should be transported to the realms
where the fairy tales end!

Instead, I sit before a dying fire, as I sat last night, and am
oppressed with the sense of tragedy. It was not altogether Carlotta's
innocence that formed the barrier between us. That which rendered it
impassable was Judith's white face.

Judith's white face will haunt my dreams to-night.

CHAPTER XVI

October 27th

I do not like living. It is thoroughly disagreeable. Today Judith
taunted me with never having lived, and I admitted the justice of
the taunt and regretted in poignant misery the change from my old
conditions. If to live is to have one's reason cast down and trampled
under foot, one's heart aflame with a besotted passion and one's soul
racked with remorse, then am I living in good sooth--and I would
far rather be dead and suffering the milder pains of Purgatory. Men
differently constituted get used to it, as the eels to skinning. They
say _"mea culpa,"_ "damn," or _"Kismet,"_ according to their various
traditions, and go forth comforted to their workaday pursuits. I envy
them. I enter this exquisite Torture Chamber, and I shriek at the first
twinge of the thumbscrew and faint at the preliminary embraces of the
scavenger's daughter.

I envy a fellow like Caesar Borgia. He could murder a friend, seduce
his widow, and rob the orphans all on a summer's day, and go home
contentedly to supper; and after a little music he could sleep like a
man who has thoroughly earned his repose. What manner of creatures are
other men? They area blank mystery to me; and I am writing--or have been
writing--a sociological study of the most subtle generation of them that
has ever existed! I am an empty fool. I know absolutely nothing. I can
no more account for the peaceful slumbers of that marvellous young man
of five-and-twenty than I can predicate the priority of the first hen or
the first egg. I, with never a murder or a seduction or a robbery on my
conscience, could not sleep last night. I doubt whether I shall sleep
to-night. I feel as if I shall remain awake through the centuries with a
rat gnawing my vitals.

So unhappy looking a woman as Judith, when I called on her early this
forenoon, I have never beheld. Gone was the elaborate coquetry of
yesterday; gone the quiet roguishness of yesteryear; gone was al