[Gutenberg 54987] • Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to [www.million-books.com](http://www.million-books.com) where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXII. THE NIGHT: THE LOVERS. Seth had gone up to his room in a state of wretchedness which, seeming insupportable at the outset, had grown steadily worse upon reflection. He said to himself that he had never before in his whole life been so humiliated and unhappy, and then smiled with pitying contempt for the inadequacy of such a statement of the case. One's career must have been titanic in its tragic experiences to warrant such a comparison. I have never known before what suffering was, he thought, as he paced up and down his little room, scourging himself with the lash of bitter reflections. To try to sleep did not enter his head. He sat for a long time on the side of the bed, seeking to evolve something like order from the chaos of his wits, but VOL. II. K he could not think. Had he tried to write, to discuss the thing in a letter, the simple, familiar operation of the pen might have led him out of the cul de sac. As it was, whichever turn his mind sought to take, there rose an impassable barrier of shame, or rage, or self-recrimination. In whatever light he tried to view the situation, it was all pain. He had been curtly, cruelly thrown off by his brother?the man to whom he owed everything?and he had had to listen to the most cutting, insulting language from this brother before they parted. Then, as he clenched his fists and fumed with impotent anger at the recollection of this language, there would come to divert this wrath, and turn it back upon himself, the facts that he had interposed his own boyish vanity and conceit to baulk this brother's purposes, and had been caught trembling on the very brink of making love to this brother's wife. Did he not richly merit Albert's scorn ? He could remember?should he ever forget the exact words of Albert's co...