'Yet pleasure requires it,' I said, 'as much as--' I was about to say pain; but why should one speak of pain in a place given up to pleasure? She smiled faintly and shook her head again. All her movements were languid and faint; her eyelids drooped over her eyes. Yet when I turned to her, she made an effort to smile. 'I think you are also tired,' I said. At this she roused herself a little. 'We must not say so; nor do I say so. Pleasure is very exacting. It demands more of you than anything else. One must be always ready--' 'For what?' 'To give enjoyment and to receive it.' There was an effort in her voice to rise to this sentiment, but it fell back into weariness again. 'I hope you receive as well as give,' I said. The lady turned her eyes to me with a look which I cannot forget, and life seemed once more to be roused within her, but not the life of pleasure; her eyes were full of loathing and fatigue and disgust and despair. 'Are you so new to this place,' she said, 'and have not learned even yet what is the height of all misery and all weariness; what is worse than pain and trouble, more dreadful than the lawless streets and the burning mines, and the torture of the great hall and the misery of the lazar-house--' 'Oh, lady,' I said, 'have you been there?' She answered me with her eyes alone; there was no need of more. 'But pleasure is more terrible than all,' she said; and I knew in my heart that what she said was true. There is no record of time in that place. I could not count it by days or nights; but soon after this it happened to me that the dances and the music became no more than a dizzy maze of sound and sight which made my brain whirl round and round, and I too loathed what was spread on the table, and the soft couches, and the garlands, and the fluttering flags and ornaments. To sit forever at a feast, to see forever the merrymakers turn round and round, to hear in your ears forever the whirl of the music, the laughter, the cries of pleasure! There were some who went on and on, and never seemed to tire; but to me the endless round came at last to be a torture from which I could not escape. Finally, I could distinguish nothing,--neither what I heard nor what I saw; and only a consciousness of something intolerable buzzed and echoed in my brain. I longed for the quiet of the place I had left; I longed for the noise in the streets, and the hubbub and tumult of my first experiences. Anything, anything rather than this! I said to myself; and still the dancers turned, the music sounded, the bystanders smiled, and everything went on and on. My eyes grew weary with seeing, and my ears with hearing. To watch the new-comers rush in, all pleased and eager, to see the eyes of the others glaze with weariness, wrought upon my strained nerves. I could not think, I could not rest, I could not endure. Music forever and ever,--a whirl, a rush of music, always going on and on; and ever that