mer wife, once in the ten years since their
separation, yet he found almost to his annoyance that the mere printed
letters of her name reinvoked her image from the darkness in which his
sentimental skeletons were laid. Two brief lines in a newspaper sufficed
to produce her as an important factor in his present life.

And despite this she was nothing to him, had no proper business in his
mind. He tried to think of the other women whom he had loved and
remembered, or of the more numerous ones still whom he had loved only to
forget. Well, he had lived a man's life, and the deuce of it was that
women should have come into it at all. He had never wanted sentiment in
the abstract, he told himself half angrily; he was bored to death by the
deadly routine of what in his own mind he alluded to as "the business of
love." It had always come to him without his sanction--even against his
will, and he had never failed to combat the feeling with shallow
cynicism, to exhaust it speedily in racing motors. There was no
satisfaction in sentiment, of this he was quite convinced; and he
remembered the voice of Madame Alta, with her peculiar high note of
piercing sweetness, which entered like wine and honey into his blood.
The hold she still kept upon his senses through his memory was
strengthened by the knowledge which fretted him to the admission that
she had wearied first--that while her fascination was still potent to
work its spell upon him, she had fled in a half lyric, half devilish
pursuit of the flesh she worshipped. To live life thoroughly, to get out
of it all that it contained of pleasure or of experience, this was the
germ of his applied philosophy; and it was only by some fortunate mental
power of selection, some instinctive sense for comeliness, for a
well-ordered, healthful physical existence, which had left him at the
end of his forty years of pleasure with a perfectly sound and active
mind and body. He himself was accustomed to declare that though he had
lived gayly, he had lived decently, too, and he was even inclined at
times to flatter his vanity rather upon the things which he had left
undone than upon those more evident achievements which had stamped him
to his social world. A religious instinct, which was hardly definite
enough for a conviction, still survived in him, and it was entirely
characteristic of the man that he should find cause for shame, not
congratulation, in his old relations with Madame Alta.

The last