itself, as by a miracle, every evening. His youth remained virgin
because of its incorruptible hope. He almost disarmed criticism by the
gaiety, the naïveté of the pursuit. She was always in front of him,
that young Joy; but if he did not overtake her by midnight, he was all
the more sure that he would find her in the morning, with the dew on
her feet and the dawn on her forehead. He was convinced that it was
that sweet mystic mouth of hers which would one day tell him the
secret of the world. And long before the morning she would pick up her
skirts and be off again, swifter than ever, carrying her secret with
her.

And so the chase went on.

At the present moment he found himself in the society of Shame, the
oldest and most haggard of all the daughters of the night. She was in
no hurry to leave him. It seemed to him that she sat beside him,
formless and immense, that she laid her hands about him, and that the
burning on his poor forehead was her brand there; that the scorching
in his poor throat was the clutch of her fingers, and the torment in
all his miserable body her fine manipulation of his nerves. She knew
the secret of the world; and had no sort of hesitation about telling
it; it sounded to him uncommonly like something that he had heard
before. He recognized her as the form and voice of his own desire, the
loathsome familiar body of unutterable thoughts, sordid, virulent,
accusing, with a tongue that lashed through the flesh to the obscure
spirit inside him. And because he was a poet, and knew himself a poet,
because he had sinned chiefly through his imagination, it was through
his imagination that he suffered, so that the horror was supreme. For
all the while, though Shame was there, his ideas were there too,
somewhere, the divine thoughts and the proud beautiful dreams, and the