abandonment with which you draw aside the curtain and
reveal the inmost thoughts of your heart,--you, who are to yourself a
miracle and a mystery, you smile inwardly, and are content. They are on
the wrong scent, and you may pursue your plans in peace. They are
indiscriminate and satisfied. They do not know the relation of what
appears to what is. If they chance to skirt along the coasts of your
Purple Island, it will be only chance, and they will not know it. You
may close your port-holes, lower your drawbridge, and make merry, for
they will never come within gunshot of the "round tower of your heart."

There is no such thing as knowing a man intimately. Every soul is, for
the greater part of its mortal life, isolated from every other. Whether
it dwell in the Garden of Eden or the Desert of Sahara, it dwells alone.
Not only do we jostle against the street crowd unknowing and unknown,
but we go out and come in, we lie down and rise up, with strangers.
Jupiter and Neptune sweep the heavens not more unfamiliar to us than the
worlds that circle our own hearthstone. Day after day, and year after
year a person moves by your side; he sits at the same table; he reads
the same books; he kneels in the same church. You know every hair of his
head, every trick of his lips, every tone of his voice; you can tell him
far off by his gait. Without seeing him, you recognize his step, his
knock, his laugh. "Know him? Yes, I have known him these twenty years."
No, you don't know him. You know his gait, and hair, and voice. You know
what preacher he hears, what ticket he voted, and what were his last
year's expenses; but you don't know him. He sits quietly in his chair,
but he is in the temple. You speak to him; his soul comes out into the
vestibule to answer you, and returns,--and the gates are shut; therein
you can not enter. You were discussing the state of the country; but
when you ceased, he opened a postern-gate, went down a bank, and
launched on a sea over whose waters you have no boat to sail, no star to
guide. You have loved and reverenced him. He has been your concrete of
truth and nobleness. Unwittingly you touch a secret spring, and a
Blue-Beard chamber stands revealed. You give no sign; you meet and part
as usual; but a Dead Sea rolls between you two forevermore.

It must be so. Not even to the nearest and dearest can one unveil the
secret place where his soul abideth, so that there shall be no more any
winding ways or hidden