Through these joyous scenes of youth and love and luxury I moved gloomily--restless, bitter, tormented by self-reproaches and by thoughts of the woman I loved. What Edna had said about her, though I knew it was by way of precautionary cattishness, put into my mind the inevitable suspicion--no, not actual suspicion, but germ of suspicion--the almost harmless germ from which the most poisonous suspicions may develop. I went round and round my mental image of Mary Kirkwood. I viewed it from all angles. But I could not find a trace of the flaw Edna had asserted. I analyzed her with all the analytical skill I possessed, and that, I flatter myself, is not a little. No one who has not the faculty of analysis ever gets anywhere; no one who has that faculty ever escapes the charge of cynicism. Shallow people--the sort that make such a charge--will regard it as proof of my utter cynicism, my absolute lack of sentiment, that I was able to analyze the woman I loved, or pretended I loved. But I assure you, gentle reader, that not even love and passion suspend the habitual processes of a good mind. The reason you have read the contrary so often is because precious few writers about men of the superior sort have the capacity to comprehend the intellects they try to picture. To the man of large affairs, the average--and many a one above the average--biography or novel about a great man reads like the attempt of a straddle bug to give his fellow straddle bugs an account of an elephant. I was the only inharmonious figure in that round of festivals. But no one observed me. I simply got the reputation of being a man of reserve, a thinker rather than a talker--as if there ever lived a thinker who did not overflow with torrents of talk like a spring fed from a glacier; but, of course, the spring flows only when The conditions are favorable, not when it is ice-bound. I was not even interested in observing. There is a monotony about the actions of fashionable people that soon reduces a spectator of agile mind to stupor. The same thing over and over again, with variations so slight that only a nit-wit would be interested in them-- Could there be a worse indictment of the intelligence of the human race than that so large a part of its presumably most intelligent classes engage in the social farce, which is an example of aimless activity about on a level with a dog’s chasing its own tail? But Edna----