hole out, into another labyrinth in the end,
it is true, still a way out. Now he saw none except one; that was
into a fiery torture, and whether it was or was not the torture of
beneficial sacrifice he could not tell.

As he sat there his face grew older with the laboring of his mind
over the track of his failures and over the certain difficulties of
the future. He sat there all the morning. Noon came, but he did not
think of food, although he had eaten little that morning. He lit
another cigar and took up the paper again, and read an account of the
suicide of a bank defaulter by shooting himself through the brain. He
fell to thinking of suicide in his own case, as a means of egress
from his own difficulties, but he thought idly, rather as a means of
amusement, and not with the slightest seriousness. He had a
well-balanced brain naturally, and maintained the balance even in the
midst of misfortune. However, a balance, however perfect, indicates
by its very name something which may be disturbed. He thought over,
idly, various means of unlawful exit from the world, and applied them
to his own case. He decided against the means employed by the
desperate bank cashier; he decided against the fiery draught of acid
swallowed by a love-distracted girl; he decided against the leap from
a ferry-boat taken by an unknown man, whose body lay unidentified in
the morgue; he decided against illuminating gas, which had released
from the woes of life a man and his three children; he thought rather
favorably of charcoal; he thought also rather favorably of morphine;
he thought more favorably still of the opening of a vein, employed by
fastidious old Romans who had enough of feast and gladiators and life
generally and wished for a chance to leave the entertainment. All
this was the merest idleness of suggestion, a species of rather
ghastly amusement, it is true, but none the less amusement, of an
unemployed and melancholy mind. But suddenly, something new and
hitherto unexperienced was over him, a mood which he had never
imagined, a possibility which he had never grasped. His brain, tried
to the extreme by genuine misery, tried in addition by dangerous
suggestion, lost its perfect poise for the time. A mighty hunger and
thirst--a more than hunger and thirst--a ravening appetite, a passion
beyond all passions which he had ever known, was upon him, had him in
its clutches. He knew for the first time the most monstrous and
irresistible passi