He felt ridiculous and humiliated.

It was no compensation that he was holding up the wall of a stucco Moorish palace and that some three hundred masked people in fancy dress were within earshot...

or did the way he was togged out make him feel all the more absurd?
The whole thing was beastly un-American....
But, was it, after all?
If he and Helene had been here together to-night, not married and harrowed, but engaged and quick with romance, would he have thought it absurd to conspire and maneuver to separate her from the crowd and snatch a few moments of heavenly solitude?
Would he have despised himself for suffering torments if she flouted him or for wanting to murder any man who balked him?
Love, and all the passions, creative and destructive, it engendered, all the sentiments and follies and crimes, to say nothing of ambition and greed and the lust to kill in war--these were instincts and traits that appeared in mankind generation after generation, in every corner civilized and savage of the globe.

The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.
And mystery and intrigue were equally a part of life, as indigenous to the Twentieth Century as to those days long entombed in history when the troops of Ferdinand and Isabella sat down on the plain before Grenada.
Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others--in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance--they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.
In these days men took a bath morning and evening, ate daintily, had a refined vocabulary to use on demand, dressed in tweeds instead of velvet.
There were longer intervals between the old style of warfare when men were always plugging one another full of holes in the name of religion or disputed territory, merely to amuse themselves with a tryout of Right against Might, or to gratify the insane ambition of some upstart like Napoleon.

To-day the business world was the battlefield, and it was his capital a man was always healing, his poor brain that collapsed nightly after the strain and nervous worry of the day.
It suddenly felt quite normal to be here flattened against a wall waiting for some impossible denouement.
Nevertheless, he was sick with apprehension.
Would it merely be the prelude to another drama?
Was his life to be a series of unwritten plays, of which he was both the hero and the bewildered spectator?
Or would it bring him calm, the terrible calm of stagnation, of an inner life finished, sealed, buried?
It was inevitable in these romantic surroundings and conditions that he should revert to his almost forgotten jealousy.