A Comedy of Masks by Ernest Dowson — Read

There are occasions when thought is terribly and comprehensively sudden: the rudimentary processes of reasoning, by analogy and syllogism, so slow and so laborious, turn to divination. We have an occult vision, immediate and complete, into the obscure manner of life, and crowd an infinity of discovery into a very few seconds. It was so with Philip Rainham now. Lightmark had scarcely closed the door, against which he now stood in a black silence, with the air of a man turned to stone; Rainham's eyes had only fallen once upon the two figures on the sofa -- Eve crushed in a corner, a sorrowful, dainty shape in the silk and lace of her pretty tea-gown, with the white drawn face of a scared child; Kitty Crichton, in her cloak and hat, bending forward a little, the hectic flush of strong excitement colouring her checks, that were already branded by her malady -- when he underwent a moral revolution. He had no more to learn.

He glanced at Lightmark curiously, almost impartially, his loathing strangely tempered by a sort of self-contempt, that he should have been so deluded. The clumsy lies which this man had told him, and which he in his indolent charity had believed! All at once, and finally, in a flash of brutal illumination, he saw Lightmark, who had once been his friend, as he really was, naked and unclean. It stripped him of all his superficial qualities; the mask of genial good-nature, the air of good-fellowship, under which his gross egoism lay concealed that it might be more securely mischievous when it went loose. His amiability was an imposture, a dangerous harlequinade; the man was bad.