shining, white walls,
its dark, blue leather and polished, mahogany fittings--the coal dust
penetrated. It rimmed the edge of the books neatly ranged on the racks.
It smirched the charts laid out on the square locker-table below. It
drifted in at the cabin windows, along with the babel of sound and the
all-pervading stench of the port. This was, in itself, sufficiently
distasteful, sufficiently depressing. And to Richard, just now, the
disgust of it came with the heightened sensibility of physical illness,
and as accompaniment to an immense private shame and immense
self-condemnation, a conviction of outlawry and a desolation passing
speech. He looked for comfort, for promise of restoration, and found
none, in things material or things intellectual, in others or in
himself. For his mind, always prone to apprehend by images rather than
by words, and to advance by analogy rather than by argument,
discovered, in surrounding aspects and surrounding circumstance, a
rather hideously apt parable and illustration of its present state.
Just as this seemingly fair city was proven, on intimate acquaintance,
repulsive beyond the worst he had ever feared and earnestly refused to
know of it, so a certain fair woman, upon whom, since boyhood, his
best, most chivalrous, most unselfish, affections had centred, was
proven--herself, moreover, flagrantly contributing to that
proving--vile beyond all that rumor, heard and passionately denied by
him, had ever ventured to whisper concerning her. Nor was the misery of
this revelation lessened by the knowledge that his own part in it all
had been very base. He had sinned before. He would sin again probably.
Richard had long ceased to regard these matters from a strictly
puritanic standpoint. But this particular sinning was different to any
that had gone before, or which could come after it. For it partook--so
at least, it now appeared to him--of the nature of sacrilege, since he
had sinned against his ideal, degrading that to gross uses which he had
agreed with himself to hold sacred, defiling it and, thereby, very
horribly defiling himself.

And this disgrace of their relation, his own and hers, the inherent
abomination of it all and its inherent falsity, had been forced home on
him with a certain violence of directness just in the common course of
daily happenings. For among the letters, brought to him along with his
first breakfast, yesterday, after that night of secret licence, had
been t