amusements; of
trying to deprive you of your pleasures.

You told me, and I know it was quite true, that you had come back at
midnight simply in order to change your dress-clothes, and go out again.

I told you at length to leave the room; you pretended to do so, but when
I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were
still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria of rage you
moved suddenly towards me. A sense of horror came over me, for what
exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and
bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two nights of stairs
to the sitting-room.

You returned silently for money; took what you could find on the
dressing table, and mantelpiece, and left the house with your luggage.
Need I tell you what I thought of you during the two lonely wretched
days of illness that followed? Is it necessary for me to state, that I
saw clearly that it would be a dishonour to myself to continue even an
acquaintance with such a one as you had showed yourself to be? That I
recognised that the ultimate moment had come and recognised it as being
really a great relief? And that I knew that for the future my art and
life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way?
Ill as I was, I felt at ease. The fact that the separation was
irrevocable gave me peace.

Wednesday was my birthday. Amongst the telegrams and communications on
my table was a letter in your handwriting. I opened it with a sense of
sadness on me. I knew that the time had gone by when a pretty phrase, an
expression of affection, a word of sorrow, would make me take you back.
But I was entirely deceived. I had underrated you.

You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving the sick bed, on my
sudden flight downstairs. "It was an ugly moment for you," you said,
"uglier than you imagine." Ah! I felt it but too well. What it had
really meant I do not know; whether you had with you the pistol you had
bought to try to frighten your father with, and that thinking it to be
unloaded, you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company;
whether your hand was moving towards a common dinner knife that by
chance was lying on the table between us; whether forgetting in your
rage your low[50] stature and inferior strength, you had thought of some
special personal insult, or attack even, as I lay ill there; I could not
tell. I do not know to the present moment. All I