I should like
very much to come and stay with you, if I may come as your friend.
You must not think from this that I have fallen in love with some one
else; I have not. I have never seen any one I shall love better than
you; I love you to-day as well as ever I did; my feelings regarding
you have changed in nothing, yet I cannot come as your lover. I am
ashamed of myself, I hate myself, but it is not my fault.

"I have been your lover for more than a year, and I could not be any
one's lover--no, not if she were Venus herself--for a longer time.

"My heart is full of regret. I am losing the best and sweetest
mistress ever man had. No one is able to appreciate your worth better
than I. Try to understand me; do not throw this letter aside in a
rage. You are a clever woman; you are, I know, capable of
understanding it. And if you will understand, you will not regret;
that I swear, for you will gain the best and most loyal friend. I am
as good a friend as I am a worthless lover. Try to understand, Helen,
I am not wholly to blame.

"I love you--I esteem you far more to-day than I did when I first
knew you. Do not let our love end upon a miserable quarrel--the
commonplace quarrel of those who do not know how to love."

He turned the letter over. He was the letter; that letter was his
shameful human nature; and worse, it was the human nature of the
whole wide world. On the same point, or on some other point, every
human being was as base as he. Such baseness is the inalienable
birth-stain of human life. His poem was no pretty imagining, but the
eternal, implacable truth. It were better that human life should
cease. Until this moment he had only half understood its awful, its
terrifying truth.... It were better that man ceased to pollute the
earth. His history is but the record of crime; his existence is but a
disgraceful episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets.

We cannot desire what we possess, and so we progress from illusion to
illusion. But when we cease to distinguish between ourself and
others, when our thoughts are no longer set on the consideration of
our own embarrassed condition, when we see into the heart of things,
which is one, then disappointment and suffering cease to have any
meaning, and we attain that true serenity and peace which we
sometimes see reflected in a seraph's face by Raphael.

As Mike's thoughts floated in the boundless atmosphere of
Schopenhauer's poem, of the denial of th