* * * * * November 9.--She loves me cruelly, with a dull passion that does not come till after youth and the years one calls the years of love are long past. I have had a terrible scene with her; terrible because, for the first time, a woman's love seems to me a wholly serious thing, and one's own feeling to matter less. My own feeling: what is it here? Shall I understand one woman, at last, when the desire to do so is over? Passions, then, are real things in women, and, if no one is responsible, at least one cannot always hold aloof from them, or go by on the other side. She loves me, and she can conceal it no longer; and she is ashamed that I should see her as she is, and she exults in her shame, and is reckless and timorous, and is at my mercy, and does not know that it is just this that holds me, and that I cannot, if I would, turn away from one now helpless, and a beggar. Something in her helplessness takes hold of me like a great force, breaks down my indifference; because, I think, it convinces me, to the roots of my mind, as no woman ever before convinced me, that what one calls love may be life itself, carrying away all the props of the world in its overflow. I am afraid of this horrible reality; but I cannot escape it. * * * * * November 10.--I try to persuade myself that I have become her lover wholly out of pity; but the more intimate self which listens is not to be persuaded. Certainly I do not love her, but is it only because she loves me, and because she is the most unfortunate of women, that ... No, there is something else, some animal attraction, which comes to me in spite of my repugnance; a gross, unmistakable desire, which I would not admit even to myself if the consciousness of it were not forced upon me. What I should not have believed in another, I experience, beyond denial, in myself. Shall a man never know what it is in him that responds, without love, to a woman's gesture? Is it a kind of animal vanity? Is it that love creates, not love, but a flattered readiness to be loved? Did I not think how terrible it would be if she fell in love again, and did I not mean, for the main part, because she could expect no return? And I was wrong. Something has taken hold of me, an appeal, a partly honest and partly perverse attraction; and I say to myself that it is pity, but though pity is part of it, it is not all pity; and I find myself, as I have always found myself, doing the exact opposite of what seems most natural and desirable. Why? * * * * *