"No, it is not enough. _Welt Schmerz_ is the chronic disease of a decadent age. If every sufferer from _Welt Schmerz_ were to turn monk, this world would be a monastery. It is a phase in every man's life--or a pose. I know it is not that with you. There is something behind, Claude--something at the back of your mind. Something that you must tell me, before I can be of any real help to you. But you are your mother's son, and were you steeped in sin, I would do my uttermost to help you. Come to me the day after to-morrow. I shall have had time to think over your case, and you will be in a better mood for considering the situation: to surrender this worldly life and all it holds is not a light thing that a man should do in a fit of the blues, a man still on the sunward side of forty. I, who have entered my seventh decade, have no yearnings for a woollen gown." "I have made up my mind," Claude repeated, in a dull, dead voice, the voice of an obstinate man. "Good night." CHAPTER XVIII The six weeks' captivity on the hill in Sussex had been a success, and Vera was able to leave England before the first November fog descended upon Portland Place. She was in Rome, in the city where she had spent the happiest period of her life--the time in which she had first known what it meant for a woman to be adored, and lovely, and immeasurably rich. There she had first known the power of wealth and the influence of beauty; for her husband's position and her own attractions had assured her an immediate social success, and had made her a star in Roman society during her first season, while, over and above all other graces, she had the charm of novelty. But it was not the memory of social triumphs or of gratified vanity that was with her as she sat alone in the too spacious saloon, or roamed with languid step through other rooms as spacious and as lonely. Sympathy had flowed in upon her from all her Roman acquaintances, and acquaintances of divers nationalities, the birds of passage, American, French, Spanish, German. Cards and little notes had descended upon the villa like a summer hailstorm; and she had responded with civility, but with no uncertain tone. Her mourning was to be a long mourning; and her seclusion was to be absolute. She had come to live a solitary life in her villa and gardens, to wander among ruins and steep herself in the poetry of the city. She had come not to the Rome of the present, but to the Rome of the past. This was how she explained her life to the officious people who wanted to force distractions upon her; and who in secret were already hatching matrimonial schemes by which the Provana millions might be made to infuse new life into princely races that were perishing in financial atrophy.