ine, and that
afternoon, through a letter addressed to you, began his first attack on
me.... It may be strange, but I had once again, I will not say the
chance, but the duty, of separating from you forced on me. I need hardly
remind you that I refer to your conduct to me at Brighton from October
10th to 13th, 1894. Three years is a long time for you to go back. But
we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow,
have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter
moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering, curious as it may
sound to you, is the means by which we exist, because it is the only
means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of
suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence,
of our continued identity. Between myself and the memory of joy lies a
gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality. Had
our life together been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of
pleasure, profligacies and laughter, I would not be able to recall a
single passage in it. It is because it was full of moments and days
tragic, bitter, sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their
monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each
separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else. So
much in this place do men live by pain that my friendship with you, in
the way through which I am forced to remember it, appears to me always
as a prelude consonant with those varying modes of anguish which each
day I have to realise, nay more, to necessitate them even; as though my
life, whatever it had seemed to myself and others, had all the while
been a real symphony of sorrow, passing through its rhythmically linked
movements to its certain resolution, with that inevitableness that in
Art characterises the treatment of every great theme.... I spoke of your
conduct to me on three successive days three years ago, did I not?

I entertained you, of course, I had no option in the matter; but
elsewhere, and not in my own home. The next day, Monday, your companion
returned to the duties[49] of his profession, and you stayed with me.
Bored with Worthing, and still more, I have no doubt, with my fruitless
efforts to concentrate my attention on my play, the only thing that
really interested me at the moment, you insist on being taken to the
Grand Hotel at Brighton.

The night we arrive you fall ill wi