On the day following that on which the committee meeting was held, I received a letter from my proposer, which overwhelmed me. He informed me that I had been balloted for by the committee, and had been unanimously blackballed. He expressed his approval of this result. "I had the power," he wrote, "to withdraw your name, but having been made acquainted with the infamies you have practised, I considered it due to the committee to disclose the matters to them, expressing at the same time my sincere regret that I should have been so misled as to place your name on the candidates' book. The unanimous blackball was given as a warning to careless members to be exceedingly careful as to the character of the persons they desired to introduce into a club of gentlemen." He then proceeded with a minute narration of the charges brought against me, and I learned the names of my accusers. First, my wife; then her brother Maxwell; then my stepmother and her son Louis; then Annette; then the servants in our house; then an independent witness in the person of a gentleman who, with Maxwell and Louis, had been stationed at the window of the house opposite to that of my bedroom, and had witnessed the scene between Barbara and me when I was shaving. This scene, which had been cunningly prepared for my benefit, was construed into an attack I had made upon my wife with my razor; her agonized shrieks were appeals for mercy; my rapid drawing down of the blind was due to my fear that my barbarous behavior might be witnessed from the opposite house. It was represented that I was a man who habitually concealed his vices beneath a veil of gentle melancholy, as of one who was himself oppressed, and that my systematic cruelty had broken down my wife's health and made her a confirmed invalid. There was a still more horrible charge. With a morbid craving for notoriety I had plied Barbara with brandy, and had made her an object lesson in the various stages of intoxication, so that my descriptions might be true to nature. She was my model, a living victim whom I was deliberately driving to madness.