"I wish I could catch and fasten the fleeting images that flit across my memory; you would grasp my mental attitude better. In the midst of all my pain,--I was sitting next him, and he was stroking my hand mechanically,--I noticed a glass case on the wall containing an Italian landscape, with ball-blue sky and pink lakes; pasteboard figures of Dutch-peasant build, with Zouave jackets, Tyrolese hats, and bandaged legs, figured in the foreground; you wound it up, and the figures danced to a _varso-viana_. I was listening to him, and yet at the same time I caught myself imagining how he and I would look dressed like that, bobbing about to the old-fashioned tune. I could hardly keep from shrieking with laughter. He had a turn-down collar on: he ought always to wear unstarched linen,--it and his throat didn't fit. You cannot understand me? Dearest woman, I do not pretend to understand the thing myself. "Did we not talk about anything? Of course we did,--Tolstoi and his doctrine of celibacy; Ibsen's Hedda; Strindberg's view of the female animal,--and agreed that Friedrich Nietszche appealed to us immensely. You must make allowances. Here was a man passionately attached to his art,--his art, that he had been treating churlishly for months for the sake of a dream. The dream was out, and he feared her revenge. That is the one potent element of consolation for me. If one has made an idiot of one's self, it is at least self-consoling to have done so for a genius. He chose the better part, if you come to think of it. The man or woman who jeopardizes a great talent--be it of writing, painting, or acting--for marriage sake is bartering a precious birthright for a mess of pottage, mostly indifferent pottage. And even if it were excellent, it is bound to pall when one has it every day. There never was a marriage yet in which one was not a loser; and it is generally the more gifted half who has to pay the heaviest toll. "I believe he was intensely sorry for me. I asked him once, you know, half playfully, half maliciously, if he had meant something, something deliciously tender,--I quoted it out of one of his letters. He paled to his lips, closed his eyes for a second, and I saw drops of sweat break out on his forehead. I sprang up and turned aside his answer. I remember when I was a little child I never would pick flowers; I always fancied they felt it, and bled to death. I used to sneak behind, and gather up all those my playmates threw down on the road or fields, and put them, stalks down, into the water in the ditch or brook; even now I can't wear them. I did not wish to hurt him either; he could not help his passion-flower withering. I suppose it was written that my love should turn, like fairy gold, into withered leaves in my grasp.