‘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 maze of movement, till the eyes were feverish and the mouth parched; ever that mist of faces, now one gleaming out of the chaos, now another, some like the faces of angels, some miserable, weary, strained with smiling, with the monotony, and the endless, aimless, never-changing round.  I heard myself calling to them to be still—­to be still! to pause a moment.  I felt myself stumble and turn round in the giddiness and horror of that movement without repose.  And finally, I fell under the feet of the crowd, and felt the whirl go over and over me, and beat upon my brain, until I was pushed and thrust out of the way lest I should stop the measure.  There I lay, sick, satiate, for I know not how long,—­loathing everything around me, ready to give all I had (but what had I to give?) for one moment of silence.  But always the music went on, and the dancers danced, and the people feasted, and the songs and the voices echoed up to the skies.

How at last I stumbled forth I cannot tell.  Desperation must have moved me, and that impatience which after every hope and disappointment comes back and back,—­the one sensation that never fails.  I dragged myself at last by intervals, like a sick dog, outside the revels, still hearing them, which was torture to me, even when at last I got beyond the crowd.  It was something to lie still upon the ground, though without power to move, and sick beyond all thought, loathing myself and all that I had been and seen.  For I had not even the sense that I had been wronged to keep me up, but only a nausea and horror of movement, a giddiness and whirl of every sense.  I lay like a log upon the ground.