But on this night there had
been a great supper and with him a great supper was a great
weakness: there had been wine, and wine was not a weakness at all,
but a glass merely made him more than happy, more than kind. Soon
after supper therefore he was strolling through the emptied rooms
in a rather lonesome way, his face like a red moon in a fog,
beseeching only that it might shed its rays impartially on any
approachable darkness.
Men with wives and children can well afford to turn hard cold faces
to the outside world: the warmth and tenderness of which they are
capable they can exercise within their own restricted enclosures.
No doubt some of them consciously enjoy the contrast in their two
selves--the one as seen abroad and the other as understood at home.
But a wifeless, childless man--wandering at large on the heart's
bleak common--has much the same reason to smile on all that he has
to smile on any: there is no domestic enclosure for him: his
affections must embrace humanity.
As he strolled through the rooms, then, in his appealing way,
seeking whom he could attach himself to, he came upon her seated in
a doorway connecting two rooms. She sat alone on a short sofa,
possibly by design, her train so arranged that he must step over it
if he advanced--the only being in the world that he hated. In the
embarrassment of turning his back upon her or of trampling her
train, he hesitated; smiling with lowered eyelids she motioned him
to a seat by her side.
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