You say that poor Susan’s mind is even more beautiful and wonderful than poor Susan’s face. Alas, how cruelly you are deceived, how rudely you must be awakened. But with Thee, beloved, it is thy mind that makes me love Thee most. Although I have wandered only a few steps along its margin, I know that a long lifetime would not suffice me to explore that goodly land with its sunny fields, its merry brooks, its great deeps, its peaks piercing the clouds of heaven. Yes, Beloved, thy mind is beautiful and wonderful. And yet it has deceived you. At the sight of a pretty face, you bent like a reed under an immense infatuation which you think is love. It is the tragedy of your life and mine, Beloved, that we, whom God made one for another, must go our separate ways, you with your infatuation, I with my love. Doubtless, before long, we shall meet. You will feel the delicacy of my position, you will be considerate, grateful, kind. And I must sit and smile and put you at your ease, while all the time my heart will be crying: This is the man who should have loved me! To-morrow all will be changed. This hour of self-revelation will belong to the past, never to have a successor. But to-night I have let myself go. If you were here at this moment, your infatuation should melt and vanish before my love, like hoarfrost before a raging fire. You should go down on your knees, you should prostrate yourself at my feet, imploring pardon for your ignoble truancy and for your treason against love. But I would make haste to forgive you, Beloved, and to raise you up, and to throw myself against your heart into your arms. I send you back your rose-leaf. It has lain by me as I have written, and I will keep nothing to remind me of this hour. So I send it back--not as it came, for it is heavy with a kiss. The sand has run out in the glass. My hour is ended. When I have laid down my pen, I shall weep. And, when I have wept, perchance I shall sleep and love you dreaming as you will never love me waking. Farewell. I laid down my pen five minutes ago. I take it up again to say that I have not wept and that I cannot sleep. What a letter I have written--what a slow-footed, cold-blooded, low-pulsed, nerveless, schoolgirlish scribble! Will the fire be able to burn it, I wonder, or will it put the fire out like an armful of damp green boughs? No, I can’t sleep. My very contempt for what I have written has awakened me in every fibre.