searched out every line carved by too much living, the little wrinkles
about the eyes, the weakness of the handsome polished hands. He looked
unspeakably aged and hideous. I had never dreamed that a brilliant mind
could leave so miserable a shell behind it, that the body was such a
mean poverty-stricken thing, a thing to be thrust out of sight as soon
as it had fulfilled its work of balking and ruining the soul. I had
never looked at Veronica after her death, and only once at my father,
who had not horrified me, for here the undertaker has arts unknown,
apparently, in Bavaria.

"My love died without a gasp. I shrank and curdled with horror that I
had loved that hideous clay. What he had aroused in me was merely the
response of youth to the masculine magnet, a trifle more specialized
than I had heretofore encountered; the inevitable fever when infection
appears. All personal feeling vanished out of me so completely that even
while I stood there I felt the same pity for him that I had for the
others, the helpless dead so mercilessly exposed to the vulgar
indifferent crowd. If I could have hurried him into the privacy of the
grave I would have exerted every effort, but before the laws of the
country I was powerless. As I was leaving the cemetery I discovered that
I still carried the wreath. I went back and added it to the bank of
greenery which his valet no doubt had provided.

"When I returned to my pension I sent for the man and learned that he
and the Consul-General of the United States had done all that the
authorities had left in their hands. The body was to be shipped to New
York within the month. He had died of Bright's disease. It had declared
itself a day or two after I left. After ten days of intermittent
suffering, during which the valet had felt no apprehension, he had died
suddenly.

"I left Munich the same day. If I have failed to give you any adequate
impression of my agonies, it will be next to impossible to describe my
subsequent states of mind. Indeed I have little remembrance of my mental
condition during the weeks of travel in Switzerland and Italy that
followed. I was deliberately living up on the surface of my nature,
indifferent to what was awaiting recognition below, although I knew it
to be nothing unwelcome. Then, finally, I felt the time had come when I
could draw aside the black curtain which I had hung for decency's sake
between my consciousness and my depths, and tell the new guest to come