y play--my first play, as every one
knows. But it had been such a success that it raised the doubt in my own
mind, just as the success of my several volumes of verse had raised
doubts. Was the public right? Were the critics right? Surely the
function of the artist was to voice life, yet what did I know of life?

So you begin to glimpse what I mean by the world-sickness that afflicted
me. Really, I had been, and was, very sick. Mad thoughts of isolating
myself entirely from the world had hounded me. I had even canvassed the
idea of going to Molokai and devoting the rest of my years to the
lepers--I, who was thirty years old, and healthy and strong, who had no
particular tragedy, who had a bigger income than I knew how to spend, who
by my own achievement had put my name on the lips of men and proved
myself a power to be reckoned with--I was that mad that I had considered
the lazar house for a destiny.

Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head. Very well.
Granted. But the turned head remains a fact, an incontrovertible fact--my
sickness, if you will, and a real sickness, and a fact. This I knew: I
had reached an intellectual and artistic climacteric, a life-climacteric
of some sort. And I had diagnosed my own case and prescribed this
voyage. And here was the atrociously healthy and profoundly feminine
Miss West along--the very last ingredient I would have considered
introducing into my prescription.

A woman! Woman! Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by their
persecutions to know them. I leave it to you: thirty years of age, not
entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in the world, and
an income most dazzling--why shouldn't women pursue me? They would have
pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake of my artistic place
alone, for the sake of my income alone.

Yes; and love! Did I not know love--lyric, passionate, mad, romantic
love? That, too, was of old time with me. I, too, had throbbed and sung
and sobbed and sighed--yes, and known grief, and buried my dead. But it
was so long ago. How young I was--turned twenty-four! And after that I
had learned the bitter lesson that even deathless grief may die; and I
had laughed again and done my share of philandering with the pretty,
ferocious moths that fluttered around the light of my fortune and
artistry; and after that, in turn, I had retired disgusted from the lists
of woman, and gone on long lance-b