“Lord save us!”—she turned on him—“What do you know about stories?” “They were tribal legends of Papua,” he confessed; modestly. “And what else have you been doing?” Quixtus made one of his old-world bows. “I’ve been falling in love.” “You’re getting on,” said Clementina. CHAPTER XVIII Let us take the case of a refined and sensitive man who has fallen, as many have fallen, under the influence of drink. Let us suppose him to have sunk lower and lower into the hell of it until delirium tremens puts a temporary end to his excesses. Let us suppose him to be convalescent, in sweet surroundings, in capable hands, relieved, for the time at least, by the strange gold drug of his craving for alcohol. His mind is clear, his perceptions are acute, he is once more a sane human being. He looks back upon his degradation with wondering horror. It is not as though he has passed through a period of dark madness of which the memory is vague and elusive. He remembers it all—all the incidents, all the besotted acts, all the benumbed, enslaved surrender of his soul. His freed self regards perplexedly the self that was in bondage. They are two different entities—and yet they are unquestionably the same. He has not been mad, because he has felt all the time responsible for his actions, and yet he must have been mad so to dishonour the divine spirit within him. The latter argument prevails. “I have been mad,” he says, and shivers with disgust. In some such puzzled frame of mind did Quixtus, freed from the obsession of the Idea, regard his self of the last few months. He remembered how it had happened. There had been several shocks; the Marrable disaster, the discovery of Angela and Hammersley’s betrayal, that of the disloyalty of his three pensioners, the cynical trick of his uncle. He remembered toying with the Idea on his homeward journey, the farcical faithlessness of the drunken housekeeper—and then, click! the hag Idea had mounted on his shoulders and ridden away with him, as Al Kohol (the very devil himself) rides away with the unresisting drunkard. Every action, every thought of this strange period was clear in his memory. He could not have been mad—and yet he must have been. To strain the analogy a trifle, the nightmare in the train and the horror of the morning had been his delirium tremens. But here the analogy suffers a solution of continuity. From that climax of devil work, the drunkard descends but slowly and gradually through tortures innumerable to the normal life of man. Shock is ineffective. But in Quixtus’s case there was a double shock—the seismic convulsion of his being at the climactic moment, and the sudden announcement of that, which to all men born is the only Absolute, final, immutable.