"Haven't you been in love since you came to Paris?" is Mr. Maugham's euphemistic question, in his effort to find out for Mrs. Strickland if her husband has been faithful to his marriage vows. After noting Strickland's "slow smile starting and sometimes ending in the eyes, which was very sensual, neither cruel nor kindly, but suggested rather the inhuman glee of the Satyr," he got this answer: "I haven't got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn't long enough for love and art." This is not what Michaelangelo said to Vittoria Colonna. It is what Tom Cat says when not in the throes of concupiscency. Then Mr. Maugham gives a new verbal dress to the devil, who was sure when ill he would like to be a monk, but who in good health didn't fancy monastic life. "You know that all the time your feet have been walking in the mud. And you want to roll yourself in it, and you find some woman, coarse and low and vulgar, some beastly creature in whom all the horror of sex is blatant, and you fall upon her like a wild animal. You drink till you're blind with rage." Poor Strickland, in the throes of mental dissolution, obsessed, enmeshed in stereotypy, is still capable of sufficient mental reaction to realize that "You are a damn fool" or "Go to hell" was not an appropriate rejoinder or comment to such a speech, so "He stared at me without the slightest movement. I held his eyes with mine. I spoke very closely." "When it's over you feel so extraordinarily pure; you feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial, and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like God." The antivivisectionists should get after Doctor Maugham. It is cruelty to humans to hold unfortunate Strickland with hypnotic eye, and then thrust a record of experience so obviously personal upon him--or was it only a recollection of some published experiences of George Sand and Alfred de Musset--garnered from those days when he "idled on the quays, fingering a second-hand book that I never meant to buy," after he settled down in Paris and began to write a play?