express the doting folly of a man who can be driven mad by a piece
of sugar soaked in coffee. There is a ghastly French phrase not to be
found in Lamartine, Chateaubriand, or any of the polite sentimentalists
_avoir les sangs tournes de quelqu'un_. It is so with me. _J'ai les
sangs tournes d'elle_. Somebody has said something somewhere about the
passion of a man of forty. It must have to do with the French phrase.

I pushed my coffee aside untasted, and buried my head in my hands,
longing, longing; eating my heart out for her. The hours passed. When
the servants were abed, I stole upstairs to her room, left as it was on
the night when Antoinette, hoping against hope, had prepared it for her
reception. I broke down. Heaven knows what I did.

I returned to the drawing-room filled with the blind rage that makes
a man curse God and wish that he could die. The fire was black, and I
mechanically took up the poker to stir it. A tempest of impotent anger
shook my soul. I saw things red before my eyes. I had an execrable lust
to kill. I was alone amid a multitude of gibbering fiends. As I stooped
before the grate I felt something scrabble my shoulders. I leapt back
with a shriek, and saw standing on the mantel-shelf a black, one-eyed
thing regarding me with an expression of infinite malice. Before I knew
what I had done, I had brought the iron down, with all my force, upon
its skull, and it had fallen dead at my feet.

_Finis coronat opus._

November 22d.

Verona:--I have abandoned the "History of Renaissance Morals." The
dog's-eared MS. and the dusty pile of notes I have shot into a lumber
heap in a corner of this room, where I sit and shiver by a little stove.
It is immense, marble, cold, comfortless, suggestive of "the vasty halls
of death." I have been here a week to-day. I thought I should find rest.
I should breathe the atmosphere of Italy again. I should ease my heart
among the masterworks of Girolamo dai Libri and Cavazzola, and, in
the presence of the blue castellated mountains they loved to paint,
my spirit would even be as theirs. In this old-world city, I fondly
imagined, I should forget the Regent's Park, and attune my mind to the
life that once filled its narrow streets.

But nothing have I found save solitude. I stood to-day before the
mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago, and hated
it with unreasoning hatred. The Madonna belied the wreath-supported
inscription above her head, _"Miserat