He pushed his mood of horror to its extremity so that he was nigh sick with it. All night in his study he prowled round and round. He locked himself in, locked the outer door, locked all her rooms and pocketed the keys. She would not, she should not, come back. No one should enter. The obscenity of the streets clung to him and he could see his situation in no other light. All his life he had regarded the violation of marriage as a thing so horrible that it could only happen among monsters and therefore so remote from himself as to find no place in his calculations. There was a certain side of human life which was settled by marriage. Outside it was obscenity, from the poison of which marriages were impregnably walled in. The walls were broken down; a filthy flood swamped the fair city of his dreams, and for a short while he was near mad with thoughts of lust and jealousy and revenge. He knew it but could not away with it. There was an extraordinary pleasure, a giddy delight in yielding to the flood, giving rein to the long penned up forces of the animal in him, and breaking into childish, impotent anger. Slowly he lingered, and he began to imagine, to invent, what others would think of him--Robert, his sister, his acquaintances at the club, and there was a sort of pleasure in the writhing of his vanity. He despised himself for it, but he wallowed in it. Never before had he seen such a quantity of mud and its appeal was irresistible. When at last he crawled out of it he sat in rueful contemplation of himself and went back to the cause of it all: the averted accident in Trafalgar Square, the hotel door swinging--the low-hanging clouds, the crowd, the Nelson statue. . . . Nelson: Emma. And Old Mole laughed: after all, there were distinguished precedents, Sir William Hamilton, most of the friends of Julius Cæsar, Hans von Bülow, George II. The thing had happened even in Thrigsby, but there it had been only a tale to laugh at, with pitying condemnation for the husband and a sudden, irrepressible envy of the lover; envy, neither more nor less; he felt gratified at the honesty of this admission, though not a little surprised at it. It was like a thin trickle of cold water upon his fever, invigorating him, so that he struggled to break through the meshes of sentimentality in which he had been caught. He broke free, and to his astonishment found himself sitting at his desk and turning over the closely written sheet which he had left on the blotting pad. He corrected a serious mistake in the topography of Trafalgar Square and went on writing. . . . The outcry of the women against the moral atmosphere of the sand heap reached up to a noble eloquence in which were declared their profound pity and sympathy for the men trapped in sensuality and habitual vice. They declared their ability to think of men as suffering human beings, wounded and deformed by ignorance and prejudice, and asked only for the like true chivalry from men. He