to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie
between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and
our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last
possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment: we should have
a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within
the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition
of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except
one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but
in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of
debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like
bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it,
and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our
impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea
of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the
irritability of our muscles.

Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions
were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other minds
around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown to-day--as a single
hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the
cramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of my
nature, welled out in this one narrow channel.

And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting her
tone of _badinage_ and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with the
sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I
was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs a woman so
little effort to beset us in this way! A half-repressed word, a moment's
unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will
serve us as _hashish_ for a long while. Out of the subtlest web of