some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally? What if he
missed her at the entrance to the opera? Or what if--most desperate
supposition--she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse to
accept his manufactured excuse to recall her home? She was capable, he
knew, of any recklessness, but he had never for an instant conceived her
as walking open eyed into dishonour, and he felt again the awful, if
partly comforting conviction that she was not herself--that an infernal
drug was working in her and bending her to some particular uses of the
devil. Why had she wasted her beauty and even her life? he wondered
bitterly--and did the moment's mad exhilaration compensate for the slow
deliberate eating away of her moral consciousness? He recalled again the
violent flutter of her manner, the excitement as of intoxication in her
voice, the yellow tinge which had crept gradually over the ivory of her
skin; her spasmodic movements and the ineffectual lies which deluded
neither of them for an instant. The tragedy of life rose before him as
vividly as the humour of it had done an hour ago--a tragedy which was
hideous because it was ignoble, in which there was neither the beauty of
resignation nor the sublimity of defiance. Had there been the
least--even the smallest redeeming honesty in the situation he felt that
he might have faced it, if not with positive sympathy yet with a
tolerant, a merciful comprehension. Love he might have understood--for
women needed it, he knew, and he was burdened by no delusion concerning
the place he occupied in Connie's horizon. But before the breathless
chase of excitement in which she lived, the frenzied invocation of
pleasure that filled her thoughts, he found himself groping blindly for
some meaning which would explain the thing it could not justify.

The hours dragged so heavily that by ten o'clock he put on his overcoat
and snow-shoes and went out again into the street. He was possessed at
the moment by a growing fear of missing Connie, and as he walked toward