be willing to sacrifice it, partly from chivalry, in order
that you might keep your promise; partly from kind-heartedness, for you
must feel how my whole life has hung on you, and how slowly these
wounds will heal. And yet, _it must be!_ How could anything that would
not make you perfectly happy ever be happiness to me?

"You shall be free again, and you may be so without any anxiety about
me. I have more strength than I seem to have. There is only one thing I
cannot bear: to see a sacrifice laid at my feet.

"Even if you were now willing to disclose your secret to me, it would
not alter my resolve. I would not have you think that I wanted to wring
anything from you, which you would not give to me of your own accord.
But that you should make a distinction between that which you share
with me, and that which belongs only to yourself ... it may seem
narrow-minded or weak or arrogant of me, but I cannot help myself, I
cannot rise above it.

"I shall never feel toward you, Felix, any differently from what I do
now; I shall never feel toward another as I do toward you. I have to
thank you for the best and dearest feelings that I have ever possessed
and experienced. No lapse of time can change this in the least--as
little as it can my resolve.

"Think kindly of me, too--without bitterness. And now
farewell!--farewell forever! Irene."

He knew this letter by heart, word for word, and yet he read it through
again, word for word, and when he came to the end all the pain, and
defiance, and anger against himself and against her blazed up within
him, as it had in the hour when he first read it. Her calmness, her
gentle strength, that he used to laugh at as artificial, although he
knew how free she was from all feminine tricks; her clear comprehension
and her courage in asserting it: all this humiliated him anew. Then,
indeed, he had comforted himself with the belief that a word from him,
a look, her name merely pronounced by his lips, would demolish the
barrier that she had raised up between them, as easily as one blows
down a tower of cards. He had bitterly deceived himself. Neither by
entreaties nor stratagems had he succeeded in again gaining access to
her. He had to admit, with a new feeling of humiliation, that she was
the stronger. Then at last he too had, as he believed, bound his breast
in the seven-fold bands of iron, and had turned away from her. For the
last time he wrote to her a short,