But beyond doubt thy sober-minded parents will explain to their daughter that I am a student, and that this is my stupid exaltation. As to being a student, if I were one yet, I might answer, like Shakespeare's Shylock, Have we not hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? It is not permissible to wrong any man, no matter who he be. My exaltation, stupid or not, gives no man the right to injure me. It is well that this present society of ours, which is like a great soulless edifice composed of stupidity, lies, and hypocrisy, is cracking and falling, since no one can live in it. I have some leisure now; I am a doctor of philosophy. I will dwell as a philosopher on various human relations, which have recoiled on me recently with such effect. For you people of judgment, so called, it is enough if you find a vain word, an empty name for a thing. Let some other man break his neck on the thing itself. Well, never mind. Exaltation! What profit is there for me in the word, if that to which you apply it wrings my entrails? What aid to me is your dictionary? Meanwhile you deny the right of existence to everything which your blunted nerves cannot feel. When the teeth have dropped from your superannuated jaws, you cease to believe in toothache. But rheumatism is serious; rheumatism hurts, while love is only exaltation. When I think of this, two men rise up in me,--one the student of yesterday, who in the name of the present would hammer human dulness with the back of an axe, the other a person deeply injured, who wishes to curse and to sob. It is impossible to live thus. We have had enough of this idealism in words, and utilitarianism in acts. The time is coming when men must fit their deeds to high principles, or have courage to proclaim principles as cynical as their deeds. God alone knows how often I have heard Tola's parents say that wealth does not constitute happiness, that character is worth more than wealth, that peace of conscience is the highest good. Are those statements true? Well, if they are, I have some character, great industry, a calm conscience; I am young and I love. Still, they turned me out of their house. Were I to win half a million in the lottery, they would give me their daughter to-morrow with delight. Her father would come to my room in the morning and open his arms to me--as God is in heaven he would.