ith me here: that
seems never to leave me: that wakes me up at night to tell me the same
story over and over till its wearisome iteration makes all sleep abandon
me till dawn: at dawn it begins again: it follows me into the prison
yard and makes me talk to myself as I tramp round: each detail that
accompanied each dreadful moment I am forced to recall: there is nothing
that happened in those ill-starred years that I cannot recreate in that
chamber of the brain which is set apart for grief or for despair; every
strained note of your voice, every twitch and gesture of your nervous
hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase comes back to me: I
remember the street or river down which we passed: the wall or woodland
that surrounded us; at what figure on the dial stood the hands of the
clock; which way went the wings of the wind, the shape and colour of the
moon.

There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is
that you loved me: that all through those two and a half years during
which the fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our
divided lives you really loved me.

Though I saw quite clearly that my position in the world of art, the
interest that my personality had always excited, my money, the luxury in
which I lived, the thousand and one things that went to make up a life
so charmingly and so wonderfully improbable as mine was, were, each and
all of them, elements that fascinated you and made you cling to me; yet
besides all this there was something more, some strange attraction for
you: you loved me far better than you loved anyone else. But you, like
myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an
entirely opposite character to mine. Do you want to learn what it was?
It was this. In you, hate was always stronger than love. Your hatred[53]
of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped,
overgrew, and overshadowed your love of me. There was no struggle
between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your hatred
and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there was no room
for both passions in the same soul: they cannot live together in that
fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become
wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which we
can see life as a whole; by which and by which alone, we can understand
others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is