supreme focus of human endeavor, with its madnesses of art, its
frenzied striving to express the Inexpressible, its spasmodic
strainings to clutch the Unattainable, its soarings of soul-fire
to the heaven of the Impossible ...

What a rejoicing there was at his return!--how radiant and level
the long Road of the Future seemed to open before him!
--everywhere friends, prospects, felicitations. Then his first
serious love;--and the night of the ball at St. Martinsville,
--the vision of light! Gracile as a palm, and robed at once so
simply, so exquisitely in white, she had seemed to him the
supreme realization of all possible dreams of beauty ... And his
passionate jealousy; and the slap from Laroussel; and the
humiliating two-minute duel with rapiers in which he learned that
he had found his master. The scar was deep. Why had not
Laroussel killed him then? ... Not evil-hearted, Laroussel,
--they used to salute each other afterward when they met; and
Laroussel's smile was kindly. Why had he refrained from
returning it? Where was Laroussel now?

For the death of his generous father, who had sacrificed so much
to reform him; for the death, only a short while after, of his
all-forgiving mother, he had found one sweet woman to console him
with her tender words, her loving lips, her delicious caress.
She had given him Zouzoune, the darling link between their
lives,--Zouzoune, who waited each evening with black Eglantine at
the gate to watch for his coming, and to cry through all the
house like a bird, "Papa, lape vini!--papa Zulien ape vini!" ...
And once that she had made him very angry by upsetting the ink
over a mass of business papers, and he had slapped her (could he