Thy
imagination--which needs but Thy will (and Thy suffering?) to be
creation!

One evening when he paid her a visit after the absence of a week, he
found her charmingly dressed, and merry, but in a strange fashion which
he could not understand. The baby, she said, was down stairs with the
landlady, and she free for her Paul. She read to him, she sang to him,
she bewitched him afresh with the graces he had helped to develop in
her. He said to himself when he left her that surely never was there a
more gracious creature--and she was utterly his own! It was the last
flicker of the dying light--the gorgeous sunset she had resolved to
carry with her in her memory forever. When he sought her again the next
evening, he found her landlady in tears. She had vanished, taking with
her nothing but her child, and her child's garments. The gown she had
worn the night before hung in her bedroom--every thing but what she must
then be wearing was left behind. The woman wept, spoke of her with
genuine affection, and said she had paid every thing. To his questioning
she answered that they had gone away in a cab: she had called it, but
knew neither the man nor his number. Persuading himself she had but gone
to see some friend, he settled himself in her rooms to await her return,
but a week rightly served to consume his hope. The iron entered into his
soul, and for a time tortured him. He wept--but consoled himself that he
wept, for it proved to himself that he was not heartless. He comforted
himself further in the thought that she knew where to find him and that
when trouble came upon her, she would remember how good he had been to
her, and what a return she had made for it. Because he would not give up
every thing to her, liberty and all, she had left him! And in revenge,
having so long neglected him for the child, she had for the last once
roused in her every power of enchantment, had brought her every charm
into play, that she might lastingly bewitch him with the old spell, and
the undying memory of their first bliss--then left him to his lonely
misery! She had done what she could for the ruin of a man of education,
a man of family, a man on the way to distinction!--a man of genius, he
said even, but he was such only as every man is: he was a man of latent
genius.

But verily, though our sympathy goes all with a woman like her, such a
man, however little he deserves, and however much he would scorn it, is
far more an object of pity.