fine, and
finely conceived, can feed love. But anything will feed hate. There was
not a glass of champagne that you drank, not a rich dish that you ate of
in all those years, that did not feed your hate and make it fat. So to
gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money,
carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequences. If you lost,
the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you won, yours, you knew,
would be the exultation and the advantages of victory.

Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the
writing on the remotest star, but hate so blinded you that you could see
no further than the narrow, walled in, and already lust-withered garden
of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one
really fatal defect in your character, was entirely the result of the
hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at
your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till
you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty
aims. That faculty in you which love would have fostered, hate poisoned
and paralysed.

The idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your
father and a man of my position seemed to delight you.

You scented the chance of a public scandal and flew to it. The prospect
of a battle in which you would be safe delighted you.

You know what my art was to me, the great primal note by which I had
revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world, the
great passion of my life, the love to which all other loves were as
marsh water to red wine, or the glow worm of the marsh to the magic
mirror of the moon.... Don't you understand now that your lack of
imagination was the one really fatal defect of your character? What you
had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you; but hate had
blinded you, and you could see nothing.

Life is quite lovely to you. And yet, if you are wise, and wish to find
life much lovelier still, and in a different manner you will let the
reading of this terrible letter--for such I know it is--prove to you as
important a crisis and turning point of your life as the writing of it
is to me. Your pale face used to flush easily with wine or pleasure. If,
as you read what is here written, it from time to time becomes scorched,
as though by a furnace blast, with shame, it will be all the better for
you. The supreme vice is shallowness.