"Do any thing?" retorted the other. "No; there's nothing to be done.
I'm a fool."

"Even that disease has been remedied before now," Rangely said coolly;"
though usually experience and time are necessary to the cure."

"I'll tell you the whole story," Herman exclaimed, flinging himself
into a chair. "It is all simple enough. It is always simple enough to
tangle things up so that Lucifer himself cannot unsnarl them. When I
was in Rome I was in love--crazily, gushingly in love, you understand,
like a big schoolboy--with a girl I found in Capri. She was a good
little thing, with a figure like Helen's; that's what did the business
for me. I coaxed her to Rome to be my model, and then that infernal
conscience of mine made me ask her to marry me. I could have done any
thing I liked with her; I knew that; she had nobody to look after her
but a half sister who paid about as much attention to her as if she had
been a grasshopper. But the infernal New England Puritanism in my blood
wouldn't let me hurt her."

"And somebody else wasn't so scrupulous?" asked the listener as his
friend paused in his story.

"You think so?" returned Herman eagerly. "Then I wasn't so unutterably
a scoundrel for thinking so, too, was I? I did doubt her; I had reason
to. She posed for a friend of mine, a painter; you know, of course--
Hang it! What's the use of going into all the details. I was poor as a
church mouse or she shouldn't have done it at all, even for him. The
gist of the story is that I was jealous and flew out at both of them,
and left Rome in a rage!"