Sin? _Sünde, pécher._ He thought of it in three or four languages, but in all it created an impression of overstatement and, more, of bad taste. He had lived for so long with a warm, intimate idea of Matilda that he resented the intrusion of morality, bidding him stand above her, judge and condemn. It might be simpler, the easiest attitude to adopt--a suit of ready-made mental clothes, reach-me-downs--but it was uncomfortable, cold, and, most astonishing of all, degrading. It was to be impersonal in a desperately personal matter. _Ça ne va pas._ _Du bist wie eine Blume. So rein und schön und hold . . ._ Like nearly every lover who has any acquaintance with the German language, he had tagged Heine's verses on to his beloved. He clutched at them now. They were still apt. He used them as a weapon with which to drive back the cause of morality, but he was still very far from the mastery of himself and the affair--_l'affaire Panoukian._ He was the victim of a fixed idea--the taxicab, the hotel door swinging round, the low-hanging clouds, the Nelson statue. . . . George II had caused the death of Königsmarck, but his sympathies had never been with George II; besides that was a monarch, and not even the success of "Lossie Loses" and his acquaintance with half the Cabinet would enable him with impunity to procure the death of Panoukian. Apart from the defence of honor and the cause of morality, what do men do in the circumstances? He was to receive instruction. . . . In the reading room he picked up an evening newspaper. It was pleasant to hold a tangible object in his fingers and to pass into the reported doings of the great and the underworld. He had heard gossip of the final catastrophe of a notoriously wretched marriage. The divorce proceedings were reported in the paper. The husband--Old Mole knew him slightly and did not like him--gave evidence to show himself as a noble and generous creature, near heartbroken, and the woman, whom his selfishness had driven into a desperate love, as light or hysterical. It was such a distortion of the known facts, such an audacious defiance of the knowledge common to all polite London, that Old Mole was staggered. He read the report again. One sentence of the evidence was almost a direct appeal for sympathy. Knowing the man, he could picture him standing there, keeping his halo under his coat-tails and donning it at the right moment. It was theatrical and very adroit. "Bah!" said Old Mole. "He is groveling to the public, sacrificing even his wife to the many headed." And his sympathies were with the woman. At least she had shown courage, and the man had lied and asked for admiration for it: so honor was defended and the cause of morality served. A little knot of men in the room were discussing the case. Their sympathies were with the man. "If a woman did that to me," said the nearest man, "I'd thrash her, I would. Thank God, I'm a bachelor."