beauty, charm, preeminence in all he touched; knowing no care,
knowing no difficulty, knowing no obstacle, or danger, or fear, or
illness, or fatigue, or anything in life but gay and singing things,
which touching, he made more bright, more tuneful yet; meeting no one,
of whatever age or degree, but his charm was to that age or degree
exactly touched; captivating all, leading all, by all desired in
leadership. Fortune's darling!

"And, Marko," she at last had come to. "And Marko--this is the
word--graceless. Utterly, utterly graceless. Without heart, Marko,
without conscience, without morals, without the smallest scrap of an
approach to any moral principle. Marko, that's an awful, a wicked, an
abominable thing for a wife to say of her husband. But he wouldn't mind
a bit my telling you. Not a bit. He'd love it. He'd laugh. He'd utterly
love to know he had stung me so much. And he'd utterly love to know he'd
driven me to tell you. He'd think--he'd love like anything to drive me
to do awful things. He's tried--especially these two years. He'd love to
be able to point a finger at me and laugh and say, 'Ah! Ha-ha! Ah!' You
know, he hasn't got any feelings at all--love or hate or anything else;
and it simply amuses him beyond anything to arouse feeling in anybody
else. There have been women all the time we've been married and he
simply amuses himself with them until he's tired of them, and until the
next one takes his fancy, and he does it quite openly before me, in my
house, and tells me what I can't see before my own eyes just for the
love of seeing the suffering it gives me. You saw that Mrs. Winfred.
He's done with her now. And he's as shameless about me with them as he
is about them with me. And what he loves above all is the way I take it;
and I can take it in no other way. You see I won't, I simply will not,
Marko, let these women of his see--or let any one in the world
suspect--that I--that I suffer. So when we are together before people I
keep up the gay way we always show together. He loves it; it's
delicious to him, because it's a game played over the torture
underneath. And I won't do any other way, Marko. I will keep my face to
the world--I won't have any one pity me."

"I pity you," he had said.

"Ah, you...."

VI

And he was suddenly shot into an encounter of extraordinary incongruity
with his thoughts and of extraordinary intensity. A voice accosted him.
He was astounded, as if suddenly awakened out of