ived himself so extremely forlorn
and lamentable, and was moved so deeply by the oppressive sorrow, that
another turn of the screw, he felt, would bring tears out of his eyes.
He was deteriorating. Five years of life in common had appeased his
longing. Yes, long-time ago. The first five months did that--but . . .
There was the habit--the habit of her person, of her smile, of her
gestures, of her voice, of her silence. She had a pure brow and
good hair. How utterly wretched all this was. Good hair and fine
eyes--remarkably fine. He was surprised by the number of details that
intruded upon his unwilling memory. He could not help remembering her
footsteps, the rustle of her dress, her way of holding her head, her
decisive manner of saying "Alvan," the quiver of her nostrils when she
was annoyed. All that had been so much his property, so intimately and
specially his! He raged in a mournful, silent way, as he took stock
of his losses. He was like a man counting the cost of an unlucky
speculation--irritated, depressed--exasperated with himself and with
others, with the fortunate, with the indifferent, with the callous; yet
the wrong done him appeared so cruel that he would perhaps have dropped
a tear over that spoliation if it had not been for his conviction
that men do not weep. Foreigners do; they also kill sometimes in such
circumstances. And to his horror he felt himself driven to regret almost
that the usages of a society ready to forgive the shooting of a burglar
forbade him, under the circumstances, even as much as a thought of
murder. Nevertheless, he clenched his fists and set his teeth hard.
And he was afraid at the same time. He was afraid with that penetrating
faltering fear that seems, in the very middle of a beat, to turn one's
heart into a handful of dust. The contamination of her crime spread out,
tainted the universe, tainted himself; woke up all the dormant infamies
of the world; caused a ghastly kind of clairvoyance in which he could
see the towns and fields of the earth, its sacred places, its temples
and its houses, peopled by monsters--by monsters of duplicity, lust, and
murder. She was a monster--he himself was thinking monstrous thoughts
. . . and yet he was like other people. How many men and women at this
very moment were plunged in abominations--meditated crimes. It was
frightful to think of. He remembered all the streets--the well-to-do
streets he had passed on his way home; all the innumerable hous