d still almost blindly
he held on to certain things in the blackness which encompassed him.
He still wished to play the man, and though in bitterness he had tried
sometimes to sink down in degradation, his body--or so it had seemed to
him--had resisted the will of the injured soul, which had said to it,
"Go down into the dirt; seek satisfaction there. Your sanity and your
purity of life have availed you nothing. From them you have had no
reward. Then seek the rewards of the other life. Thousands of men enjoy
them. Join that crowd, and put all the anemic absurdities of so-called
goodness behind you."

He had almost come to hate the state he conceived of as goodness; yet
the other thing, its opposite, evil, he instinctively rebelled against
and even almost feared. The habit of a life-time was not to be broken in
a day, or even in many days. Often he had thought of himself as walking
in nothingness, because he rejected evil.

Goodness had ruthlessly cast him out; and so far he had made no other
friend, had taken no other comrade to his bruised and bleeding heart.

Mrs. Clarke began to talk to him quietly. She talked abut herself, and
he knew that she did this not because of egoism, but because delicately
she wished to give him a full opportunity for recovery. She had seen
just where he was, and she had understood his recoil from the abyss. Now
she wished, perhaps, to help him to draw back farther from it, to draw
back so far that he would no longer see it or be aware of it.

So she talked of herself, of her life at Buyukderer in the summer, and
in Pera in the autumn and spring.

"I don't go out to Buyukderer till the middle of May," she said, "and I
come back into town at the end of September."

"You manage to stand Pera for some months every year?" said Dion,
listening at first with difficulty, and because he was making a
determined effort.

"Yes. An Englishwoman--even a woman like me--can't live in Stamboul.
And Pera, odious as it is, is in Constantinople, in the city which has a
spell, though you mayn't feel it yet."

She was silent for a moment, and they heard the roar from the Grande
Rue, that street which is surely the noisiest in all Europe. Hearing
it, Dion thought of the silence of the Precincts at Welsley. That sweet
silence had cast him out. Hell must be full of roaring noises and
of intense activities. Then Mrs. Clarke went on talking. There was
something very feminine and gently enticing in her voice,