Slowly, he had learnt the great, great secret that happiness is to be found, not in grand palaces, not in wealth, not in success, but amongst the lowly and little things of life, the things that no man can appreciate who has not a free and untroubled conscience.
The new book, the pipe of tobacco smoked beneath the cherry trees of a morning, the home-coming of Campanula from school of an evening laden with books and perplexities, the rubber of whist with Mr. Initogo, the quaint, funny things that are always happening in a Japanese household—these and a thousand other trifles had made up the sum of his life, and the addition of them made happiness.
And Campanula—he little knew how much she had entered into his being—what a multitude of impalpable threads bound her to him, threads that had been spinning from the very first day, when he found her lost amidst the crimson azaleas!
He had eaten the lotus for nearly five years; he had been preparing a future of happiness and peace, and who knows what boundless possibilities of love?
Suddenly, Satan had appeared before him with the command, “Get up and fight, fight me for this future you have been preparing for yourself; fight me for the beauty of it, the happiness you will have in it, the happiness you will make for others in it; get it if you can, for my weapon is Lust.”
That night, when the moon, now waxing stronger, laid her patient square of pure white light on the floor of his room, the battle began in earnest.
He had determined on going to Arita on the morrow to get away for a while from the woman against whom he felt fate was driving him with ruinous intent.
Now, as he lay alone, with the powers of good and evil on either side of him, he reviewed his position clearly for the first time.
The cold, calculating, sneaking, pickpocket form of adultery, which is the canker at the heart of English society—to put it in plain English, the bestial use of another man’s wife behind his back—was a form of crime as unthinkable to Leslie as the crime of cheating at cards, or forging a check.
To obtain the woman he wanted, there was only one way. The open way.