his eyes are expressionless, there is about him the loud swagger of the
_caserne_, and he suggests the inevitable question, Why did she marry
him?--a question that every young man of refined mind asks a thousand
times by day and ten thousand times by night, asks till he is
five-and-thirty, and sees that his generation has passed into middle
age.

Why did she marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great
mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry
space will give him answer; no Œdipus will ever come to unravel this
riddle; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the
clangour of the sea-gulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret;
and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten.

The young man shakes hands with the husband; he strives not to look
embarrassed, and he talks of indifferent things--of how well he (the
husband) is looking, of his amusements, his projects; and then he (the
young man of refined mind) tastes of that keen and highly-seasoned
delight--happiness in crime. He knows not the details of her home life,
the husband is merely a dark cloud that fills one side of the picture,
sometimes obliterating the sunlight; a shadowy shape that in certain
moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a rock-sculptured,
imminent monster, but the shadow and the shape and the threat are
magnetic, and in a sense of danger the fascination is sealed.

The young man of refined mind is in a ball-room! He leans against the
woodwork in a distant doorway; hardly knowing what to do with himself,
he strives to interest himself in the conversation of a group of men
twice his age. I will not say he is shunned; but neither the matrons nor
the young girls make any advances towards him. The young girls so