d certainly got their fun out of it, even if
in the end they paid high. He was paying high--and perhaps getting
nothing at all. Wouldn't it be better if he went off this minute
somewhere, and made a night of it?--made a night which would be but the
beginning of a long succession of nights of the same kind? Then when he
was ruined beyond recovery, or in his grave, Edith would know what she
had done to him. He had tried every other way of bringing it home to her
but that. That might succeed where argument had failed. She couldn't
have a mind so much astray as not to be sorry when she saw, or heard of,
the wreck she would have made of him.

It was worth thinking of, and he sat and thought of it. He tried to
conjure up the picture of himself as really besotted--he was not
besotted as yet, even when the worst was said!--degraded, revolting. He
rose to take a cigar, to help his imagination in the task to which he
had set it, but he remembered that the cigar suggested a whisky-and-soda
to go with it, and there was a bottle of Old Piper in the cupboard. He
fell back into his seat again with the longing unsatisfied, but he
continued his dream. It was so pleasant a dream--that is, there were so
many advantages to the course he thought of taking, that he ended by
springing to his feet and saying, almost aloud, "By God, I'll do it."

The resolution being formed, there was a large selection of ways and
means of putting it into execution. He could do this or that. He could
go here or there. It was a bewilderment of choice that saved him. He sat
down again.

No; when it came to the point he wasn't equal to it. It was not the end
he shrank from, but the means--the places to which he would have to go,
the people he would have to consort with. He knew just enough of them to
be sickened in advance. It was with a sense of fleeing to escape that he
hurried to the telephone and called up Emery Bland, asking to be allowed
to accept his invitation.

He arrived at Mountain Brook late on an afternoon in early June, just as
the sun, hovering above the point of its setting, was throwing an almost
horizontal light on the northern and western slopes of Monadnock. The
mountain raised its majestic mass as the last and successful effort of a
tumbling, climbing wilderness of hills. Scattered amid the
upward-sweeping stretches of maple and oak, groves of spruce and pine
had the effect of passing rain-clouds. In the clear air, against the
clear sky, e