know is that a feeling
of utter horror had come over me, and that I had felt that unless I left
the room at once and got away, you would have done or tried to do
something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong
shame....

On your return to town from the actual scene of the tragedy to which you
had been summoned, you came at once to me very sweetly and very simply,
in your suit of woe, and with your eyes dim with tears. You sought
consolation and help, as a child might seek it. I opened to you my
house, my home, my heart. I made your sorrow mine also, that you might
have help in bearing it. Never even by one word, did I allude to your
conduct towards me, to the revolting scenes, and the revolting letter.

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to
scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle,
humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would
not now be weeping in this terrible place.

Of course, I discern in all our relations, not destiny merely, but
Doom--Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding
of blood. Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is
horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its
own life, or on the lives of others.

In every little circumstance in which the ways of our lives met, in
every point of great or seemingly trivial import in which you came to me
for pleasure or help, in the small chances, the slight accidents that
look, in their relation to life, to be no more than the dust that dances
in a beam, or the leaf that flutters from a tree, ruin followed like the
echo of a bitter cry, or the shadow that hunts with the beast of prey.

Our friendship really begins with your begging me, in a most pathetic
and charming letter, to assist you in a position appalling to anyone,
doubly so to a young man at Oxford. I do so, and ultimately, through
your using my name as your friend with Sir George Lewis I begin to lose
his esteem and friendship, a friendship of fifteen years' standing. When
I was deprived of his advice and help and regard, I was deprived of the
one great safeguard of my life. You send me a very nice poem of the
undergraduate school of verse for my approval. I reply by a letter of
fantastic literary conceits; I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth,
Jonquil or Narcissus, or some one whom the Great God of Poetry favoured,
and honoured with