“I will not tell you how soon I discovered your indifference--how soon another person demonstrated to me that your feeling towards me was even something worse than indifference; that it was dislike and contempt which I inspired in your mind. My dense ignorance of the world, and your amiable nature, would have prevented my making this discovery of my own accord. But there are always plenty of those ‘good-natured friends’ the man in the play talks about. _I found such a friend._ If you have any curiosity upon the subject, Rosa Grunderson, who is a good honest-hearted little girl, will tell you the name of the man who opened my eyes to the full misery of my position. In writing this, Maude, I have no thought of reproach against _you_. To me you have been and always will be something so bright and lovely as to be amenable to none of the common laws which govern common natures. When you offered to be my wife, you yielded to a generous impulse; and it is I who deserve reproach for having been so base in my blind selfishness as to accept the sacrifice you were willing to offer in repayment of a fancied obligation. I cannot undo the past; but I can at least set you in some manner free from the fetters you forged for yourself under the influence of that brief enthusiasm. So long as I live, one of the miseries of my life will be the knowledge that I shut you out of a brighter fate; that I deprive you of a more worthy companion; that the greatest sacrifice I can make in atonement of the past will only make you the lonely widow of a living husband. But I can at least rid you of the society of a man whose presence inspires you with disgust and loathing. O Maude, I am quoting your own words; spoken so deliberately, so coldly, that I should be indeed mad and cowardly, were I to shrink from accepting them in their fullest import. I might have doubted until to-night; I might have hugged myself with the notion that a liar and a scoundrel, for his own base purposes, had taught me to think myself despised and disliked; but your own lips have spoken, and I can doubt no longer. Oh, my darling, my pet, my beloved, this seems so like a reproach; but it is not, it is _not_.