tissue in his body, most passionately wanted to do.

The knout that flogged his soul had a score of lashes, each with the
sting of its own peculiar venom. Everybody who knew him, his closer
friends, and his casual acquaintances as well, must have known, for
weeks, of this disgrace. His friends had been sorry for him, with just a
grain of contempt; his acquaintances had grinned over it with just a
pleasurable salt of pity. "Do you know Aldrich? Well, his wife's in the
chorus at the Globe Theater. And he doesn't know it, poor devil." That
group at the round table at the club to-night. He could fancy their
faces after he'd turned away.

Oh, but what did they matter after all? What did any of them matter?
What did anything matter in the world, except that the woman he'd so
whole-heartedly and utterly loved and lived for--the woman who'd left
him with those protestations of the need of his friendship and respect,
was there on that stage disporting herself for hire--and cheap hire at
that, before this fatuous mass of humanity packed in all about him. They
were staring at her, as the money they'd paid for admission entitled
them to stare, licking their lips over her.

He hadn't had a moment's uncertainty that it was indeed she. Couldn't
shelter himself, even for an instant, behind Jimmy Wallace's theory of
an "amazing resemblance."

The others of their world had always known Rose as a person with a good
deal of natural and quite unconscious dignity. She had never romped nor
larked before any of them, and she conveyed the impression, not of
refraining as a concession to good manners, but simply of being the sort
of person who didn't, naturally, express herself in those ways. But in
the interior privacies of their life together, she'd often shown
herself, for him, a different Rose. She'd played with him with the
abandon of a young kitten--romped and wrestled with him. And there'd
been a deliciousness about this phase of her, which resided, for him, in
the fact that it was kept for him alone.

But now, here on the stage of a cheap theater, she was parading that
exquisite thing before the world! Along in the second act, where
Sylvia's six friends come to spend the night with her and sleep out on
the roof, there was a mad lark which brought up maddening memories. He
felt that he must get his hands on her--shake her--beat her!

Yet, all the while, if any of his neighbors thought of him at
all--became aware of him and wondered