* * * * *
Now he paced the room in deep thought. For the first time he found
himself an actor in modern life, which hitherto for him meant digging
among excavations, or making romantic restoration for jaded connoisseurs,
of some faultless work of art described by Pausanias and hidden for
centuries beneath the rubbish of modern Greece. The entire absence of
horror appalled him. Even the dignity of tragedy was not there. He was
wrestling with hideous melodrama, often described to him by patrons of
Thespian art at transpontine theatres. The vulgarity--the
anachronism--made him shudder. Having till now ignored the issue of the
present, he began to be sceptical about the virtues of antiquity.
Antiquity, his only religion, his god, whose mangled incompleteness
endeared it to him, was crumbling away. He wondered if there were
friends with whom he might share his ugly secret. There was young
Fairleigh, who was always so modern, and actually read modern books. He
might have coped with the blackmailer alive, but hardly with his corpse.
You cannot run round and ask neighbours for coffins, false beards, and
rope in the delightful convention of the _Arabian Nights_, because you
have grazed modern life at a sharp angle, without exciting suspicion or
running the risk of positive refusal. There was his wife, to whom he
confided everything; but she was a lady from Massachusetts, and her
father was European correspondent to many American papers of the highest
repute.
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