Their Son the Necklace by Eduardo Zamacois

Darles got up next morning very early and went wandering out into the / street. He was completely done up. The night had been one of terror and / insomnia; and when day had dawned, finding him in his miserable little / room -- a room whose only furniture was a bureau covered with books and / magazines, a rickety pine table and a few rush-bottomed chairs, all mean / and old -- the realization of his solitude had struck him with the / violence of a blow. He had felt that profound agitation which / psychologists call "claustrophobia," or the fear of enclosed spaces.

For a long time he wandered about, absorbed in vacillations that had / neither name nor plan. He hardly knew himself. His conscience had been / cruelly wrung in a few hours of suffering; and from this savage / convulsion of the soul unsuspected developments were emerging, enormous / moral unfoldings, filled with terrifying perplexities. His despair had / loosed a stupendous avalanche of problems against the bulwark of those / moral principles which had been taught him as a child. And each of these / questions was now a terrible problem for him. Where, he wondered, does / virtue end? Where does sin commence? And if all our natural forces / should go straight toward the goal of happiness, why should there be any / desires that codes of formulated ethics should judge depraved and / sinful? Why should not everything which pleases be allowed?