left him little but a great name and a small and
ridiculous body. He thought of his father, whose expensive
eccentricities had amused his fellow-countrymen at the cost of his
fortune; his mother, for whom death had been a blessing; his
grandparents and his uncles, in whom no man had found any good. But
most of all he cursed himself, for whose follies even heredity might
not wholly account. He recalled the school where he had made no
friends, the University where he had taken no degree. Since he had
left Oxford, his aimless, hopeless life, profligate, but
dishonourable, perhaps, only by accident, had deprived even his title
of any social value, and one by one his very acquaintances had
left him to the society of broken men and the women who are anything
but light. And these, and here perhaps the root of his bitterness
lay, even these recognised him only as a victim for their mockery, a
thing more poor than themselves, whereon they could satisfy the anger
of their tortured souls. And his last misery lay in this: that he
himself could find no day in his life to admire, no one past dream to
cherish, no inmost corner of his heart to love. The lowest tramp, the
least-heeded waif of the night, might have some ultimate pride, but
he himself had nothing, nothing whatever. He was a dream-pauper, an
emotional bankrupt.

With a choked sob he drained his brandy and told the waiter to bring
him another. There had been a period in his life when he had been
able to find some measure of sentimental satisfaction in the stupor
of drunkenness. In those days, through the veil of illusion which
alcohol had flung across his brain, he had been able to regard the
contempt of the men as the intimacy of friendship, the scorn of the
women as the laughter of light love. But now drink gave him
nothing but the mordant insight of morbidity, which cut through his
rotten soul like cheese. Yet night after night he came to this place,
to be tortured afresh by the ridicule of the sordid frequenters, and
by the careless music of the orchestra which told him of a flowerless
spring and of a morning which held for him no hope. For his last
emotion rested in this self-inflicted pain; he could only breathe
freely under the lash of his own contempt.

Idly he let his dull eyes stray about the room, from table to table,
from face to face. Many there he knew by sight, from none could he
hope for sympathy or even companionship. In his bitterness he envied
the cou