Damn all marriage! Damn all free love! God damn to hell all women!


I thought of many ways of committing suicide. But I only thought of them.

I flung out into the night, meaning to go and tell Mrs. Rond of the incredible doom that had fallen upon me, the unspeakable betrayal.

"Poor Penton!" I cried. "Poor Penton!"

At last I sympathised fully with him.


Ashamed, in my slowly gathering new man's pride, I did not go in to see Mrs. Rond. Instead, I drove past her house with that curious, bent-kneed walk of mine,—and I walked and walked, not heeding the cold, till the ocean shouldered, phosphorescent, in the enormous night toward me.


Home again, I slept like a drunkard. It was broad day when I woke.