eur
speaks."

"It makes me fear, too, Antoinette," said I, gravely.

When she had gone I took the box of furs upstairs and laid it unopened
on Carlotta's bed and came away, relocking the door behind me.

November 9th.

I have formed a great resolution. I have devoted the week to the
envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the solution
came to me as something final and irrevocable. Mistrusting the counsels
of the night, when the brain is unduly excited by nervous insomnia, I
have applied the test of a day's cold reason.

I have broken a woman's heart. I have spurned the passionate love of a
woman who has been near and dear to me; a woman of great nature; a woman
of subtle brain who has been my chosen companion, my equal partner in
any intellectual path I chose to tread; a sensitive lady, with all the
graciousness of soul that term conveys. Heaven knows what a woman can
see in me to love. I look in the glass at my bony, hawk-like face, on
which the stamp of futility seems eternally set, and I am seized with a
prodigious wonder; but the fact remains that to me unlovely and unworthy
has been given that thing without price, a woman's love. I remember
Pasquale laughing merrily at this valuation. He said the love of women
was as cheap as dirt, and the only use for it was to make mud pies. The
damned cynical villain! "Always reflect," said he, on another occasion,
"that although a man may be as ugly as sin, the probability is that he
is just as pleasant. Beauties will find hitherto unsuspected amenities
in Beasts till the end of time." But I am such a poor and sorry Beast,
without the chance of a transformation; a commonplace Beast, dull and
didactic; a besotted, purblind, despicable Beast! Yet Judith loved me.
Instead of thanking on my knees the high gods for the boon conferred, I
rejected it, and went mad for craving of the infinitely lesser glory of
Carlotta's baby lips and gold-bronze hair. I have broken Judith's heart.
I will expiate the crime I have committed.

Expiate the crime! The realisation of the meaning of the words covers
me with shame. As if what I propose will be a sorry penance! That is the
danger of a man thinking, as I have always done, in metaphors. It has
given me my loose, indirect views of life, of myself, of those around
me. If I had advice to offer to a young man, I should say: "Learn to
think straight." Expiate, indeed! I will go to her and make confession.
I will tell her tha