for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word. - Vladimir Nabokov

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.

I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure — even when the velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon — that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish one's prepared triumph.

It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues.