When I had got out into the street, a few minutes later, I questioned myself as to whether I had shown any piteous awkwardness in my exit from the drawing-room. No, I soon concluded. My nerve had befriended me; I had somehow managed to play no fool's part. I had made it appear as if those "business-letters" were truly substantial claimants upon the rest of my evening.
"Live in that house!" I thought, as I walked along through the lamplit quietude of Second Avenue. "What might happen, now, if I were mad enough to really go and live there?"
IX.
Two days afterward Demotte called upon me in my laboratory. The moment I looked into his face I discovered that he was perturbed, discomposed. "Are you very hard at work?" he asked, seating himself near a window and absently moving the slant shadow of his cane here and there on the sun-flooded carpet.
"No," I said, letting my gaze wander among the various paraphernalia that filled the apartment. "I am getting to be a confirmed idler, I fear."
"An idler? You?"
"Yes. My work has come to a kind of stand-still, somehow." I thought, while I gave this reply, to what depths of meaning it pointed.
"You're on the verge of some magnum opus, I suppose, and pause accordingly."
I tried to laugh in an unforced way. "That's a most charitable definition, Floyd, of my laziness."
"You don't know what laziness means, my dear fellow, any more than I know what industry means. . . It might have proved of infinite benefit to me if I'd been born a poor man. I sometimes think that book-collecting hobby of mine has been ridden quite far enough. In any case, the mania is a good deal less violent than formerly. Perhaps if I'd had some true occupation, Douglas, I'd . . I'd possess a healthier mind than at this moment."
"And you think your mind an unhealthy one now?"
I saw precisely the drift of his conversation, but I preferred that he should not perceive this was the case. His tone of self-pity astonished me; I was unprepared to hear him approach the subject of his relations with Millicent; but provided he did so at all, self-defence looked his one calculable and prospective method. Could he possibly mean to denounce his own conduct as blamable?
Such was his intent, as he soon made clear. "How can a mind be anything except unhealthy that turns, as mine does, blessings into torments? Millicent is the loveliest creature in all the world; I should take the keenest delight and pride whenever she won the admiration of others." He made a gesture of the most pitiable exasperation. "But I can't find anything except a dull, gnawing misery in her sanest, purest diversions. It must be a kind of insanity with me; I suppose it is. You know all about it by this time. . . Good God! I don't
