urgeon in anatomy--than for him to be an
expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon. I look back with
feelings of shame and degradation to the days when, for the sake of a
crust of bread, I prostituted my intelligence to wasting the precious
hours of impressionable childhood, which could have been filled with
so many beautiful and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and
inhuman subject. It trains the mind--it teaches boys to think, they say.
It doesn't. In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit into a
school curriculum. Its sacrosanctity saves educationalists an enormous
amount of trouble, and its chief use is to enable mindless young men
from the universities to make a dishonest living by teaching it to
others, who in their turn may teach it to a future generation.

I am mad to-night--why have I indulged in this diatribe against
mathematics? I must find some vent, I suppose. I see now. I was
saying that I earned my right to live, that I am not an idler. I cling
strenuously to the claim. A man cannot command respect, even his own, by
the mere reason of his _vie sentimentale_. And, after what I have done
to-day, I must force my claim to the respect which on other grounds I
have forfeited.

I spent, then, my day in unremitting toil. But this evening the horrible
craving for her came over me. Such a little thing brought it about.
Antoinette, who disapproves of the amorphous British lumps of sugar, has
found some emporium where she can buy the regular parallelopiped of
the Continent, and these she provides for my afterdinner coffee.
Absent-mindedly I dipped the edge of the piece of sugar into the liquid,
before dropping it, and watched the brown moisture rise through the
white crystals. Then I remembered. It was an invariable practice of
Carlotta's. She would keep the lump in the coffee to saturation-point
between her fingers, and then hastily put it into her mouth, so that it
should not crumble to pieces on the way. If it did, there would be much
laughter and wiping of skirts; and there would be a search through my
dinner-jacket pockets for a handkerchief to dry the pink tips of
her fingers. She called the dripping lump a canard, like the French
children. It was such a trivial thing; but it brought back with a rush
all the thousand dainty, foolish, captivating intimacies that made up
the maddening charm of Carlotta.

Yes, I am aware that there is no language spoken under heaven that can
fitly