that sort of thing--to be rooted out by men of good-will, with careers
to make. The point was that that was what they were really doing out
there--rooting out the barbarians as well as the barbarism, and proving
themselves worthy of their hire. And I had been writing them up and was
no better than the farcical governor of a department who would write on
the morrow to protest that that was what they did not do. You see I had
a sort of personal pride in those days; and preferred to think of myself
as a decent person. I knew that people would say the same sort of thing
about me that they said about all the rest of them. I couldn't very well
protest. I _had_ been scratching the backs of all sorts of creatures;
out of friendship, out of love--for all sorts of reasons. This was only
a sort of last straw--or perhaps it was the sight of her that had been
the last straw. It seemed naïvely futile to have been wasting my time
over Mrs. Hartly and those she stood for, when there was something so
different in the world--something so like a current of east wind.

That vein of thought kept me awake, and a worse came to keep it company.
The men from the next room came home--students, I suppose. They talked
gaily enough, their remarks interspersed by the thuds of falling boots
and the other incomprehensible noises of the night. Through the flimsy
partition I caught half sentences in that sort of French intonation that
is so impossible to attain. It reminded me of the voices of the two men
at the Opera. I began to wonder what they had been saying--what they
could have been saying that concerned me and affected the little
correspondent to interfere. Suddenly the thing dawned upon me with the
startling clearness of a figure in a complicated pattern--a clearness
from which one cannot take one's eyes.

It threw everything--the whole world--into more unpleasant relations
with me than even the Greenland affair. They had not been talking about