ance
and lassitude, as when he issued from that room. He strolled haphazard
down the rue Soufflot, and the image of the unknown obsessed him, more
irritating, more tenacious.

"I begin to understand the superstition of the succubus. I must try some
bromo-exorcism. Tonight I will swallow a gram of bromide of potassium.
That will make my senses be good."

But he realized that the trouble was not primarily physical, that really
it was only the consequence of an extraordinary state of mind. His love
for that which departed from the formula, for that projection _out of
the world_ which had recently cheered him in art, had deviated and
sought expression in a woman. She embodied his need to soar upward from
the terrestrial humdrum.

"It is those precious unworldly studies, those cloister thoughts
picturing ecclesiastical and demoniac scenes, which have prepared me for
the present folly," he said to himself. His unsuspected, and hitherto
unexpressed, mysticism, which had determined his choice of subject for
his last work was now sending him out, in disorder, to seek new pains
and pleasures.

As he walked along he recapitulated what he knew of the woman. She was
married, blonde, in easy circumstances because she had her own sleeping
quarters and a maid. She lived in the neighbourhood, because she went to
the rue Littre post-office for her mail. Her name, supposing she had
prefixed her own initial to the name of Maubel, was Henriette, Hortense,
Honorine, Hubertine, or Helene. What else? She must frequent the society
of artists, because she had met him, and for years he had not been in a
bourgeois drawing-room. She was some kind of a morbid Catholic, because
that word succubus was unknown to the profane. That was all. Then there
was her husband, who, gullible as he might be, must nevertheless suspect
their liaison, since, by her own confession, she dissembled her
obsession very badly.

"This is what I get for letting myself be carried away. For I, too,
wrote at first to amuse myself with aphrodisiac statements. Then I ended
by becoming completely hysterical. We have taken turns fanning
smouldering ashes which now are blazing. It is too bad that we have both
become inflamed at the same time--for her case must be the same as mine,
to judge from the passionate letters she writes. What shall I do? Keep
on tantalizing myself for a chimera? No! I'll bring matters to a head,
see her, and if she is good-looking, sleep with her. I sh