This frightful idea fascinated while it chilled him, and helped to make it nearly impossible for him to keep away from the theatre.  In the beginning his attendance had not interfered with his social duties or pleasures; but now he came to find it distasteful after dinner to do anything but read, or walk the streets aimlessly, until it was time to go to the play.  When that was over, he was in no mood to go anywhere but to his rooms.  So he dropped away by insensible degrees from his habitual haunts, was missed, and began to be talked about at the club.  Catching some intimation of this, he ventured no more in the orchestra stalls, but shrouded himself behind the draperies of the private box in which Delaney and I thought we saw him on one occasion.

Now, I find it very perplexing to explain what Van Twiller was wholly unable to explain to himself.  He was not in love with Mademoiselle Olympe.  He had no wish to speak to her, or to hear her speak.  Nothing could have been easier, and nothing further from his desire, than to know her personally.  A Van Twiller personally acquainted with a strolling female acrobat!  Good heavens!  That was something possible only with the discovery of perpetual motion.  Taken from her theatrical setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe Zabriski would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller’s body.  He was simply fascinated by her marvelous grace and elan, and the magnetic recklessness of the girl.  It was very young in him and very weak, and no member of the Sorosis, or all the Sorosisters together, could have been more severe on Van Twiller than he was on himself.  To be weak, and to know it, is something of a punishment for a proud man.  Van Twiller took his punishment, and went to the theatre, regularly.

“When her engagement comes to an end,” he meditated, “that will finish the business.”

Mademoiselle Olympe’s engagement finally did come to an end and she departed.  But her engagement had been highly beneficial to the treasury-chest of the uptown theatre, and before Van Twiller could get over missing her she had returned from a short Western tour, and her immediate reappearance was underlined on the play-bills.

On a dead wall opposite the windows of Van Twiller’s sleeping-room there appeared, as if by necromancy, an aggressive poster with MADEMOISELLE OLYMPE ZABRISKI on it in letters at least a foot high.  This thing stared him in the face when he woke up one morning.  It gave him a sensation as if she had called on him overnight and left her card.

From time to time through the day he regarded that poster with a sardonic eye.  He had pitilessly resolved not to repeat the folly of the previous month.  To say that this moral victory cost him nothing would be to deprive it of merit.  It cost him many internal struggles.  It is a fine thing to see a man seizing his temptation by the throat, and wrestling with it, and trampling it underfoot like St. Anthony.  This was the spectacle Van Twiller was exhibiting to the angels.