quite lost and miserable. Something seemed taken away out of one's life. Then there didn't seem much to do, and some of the old set looked me up and I have been racketing about town a good bit."
"I thought you'd got over all that, Harold; because, putting it on no other grounds, you know the game is not worth the candle."
"So I had, Basil, before" — he swallowed something in his throat — "before this happened. I didn't believe in it at first, of course, or, at least, not properly, when I got Hands' s letter. But when I got out East — and you don't know and won't be able to understand how the East turns one's ideas upside down even at ordinary times — when I got out there and saw what Hands had found, then everything seemed slipping away. Then the Commission came over and I was with them all and heard what they had to say. I know the whole private history of the thing from first to last. It made me quite hopeless — a terrible feeling — the sort of utter dreariness that Poe talks of that the man felt when he was riding up to the House of Usher. Of course, thousands of people must have felt just the same during the past weeks. But to have the one thing one leaned upon, the one hope that kept one straight in this life, the hope of another and happier one, cut suddenly out of one's consciousness! Is it any wonder that one has gone back to the old temptations? I don't think so, Basil."
His voice dropped, an intense weariness showed in his face. His whole body seemed permeated by it, he seemed to sink together in his chair. All the mental pain he had endured, all the physical languor of fast living, that terrible nausea of the soul which seizes so imperiously upon the vicious man who is still conscious of sin; all these flooded over him, possessed him, as he sat before his friend.
