But indeed I fancy that I am rich enough to be able to restore to them all that I have taken. And, looking at Edward Burden’s little _fiancée_, I was almost tempted to set upon that weary course of juggling. But I am at the end of my tether. I cannot live without you longer. And I do not wish to ask you. Later I will tell you. Or No--I will tell you now. You see, my dear thing, it is a question of going one better. It would be easy enough to deceive your husband: it would be easier still to go away together. I think that neither you nor I have ever had any conscientious scruples. But, analysing the matter down to its very depths, I think we arrive at this, that without the motives for self-restraint that other people have we are anxious to show more self-restraint than they. We are doing certain work not for payment but for sheer love of work. Do I make myself clear? For myself I have a great pride in your image. I can say to myself: “Here is a woman, my complement. She has no respect for the law. She does not value what a respect for the law would bring her. Yet she remains purer than the purest of the makers of law.” And I think it is the converse of that feeling that you have for me. If you desire me to live on, I will live on: I am so swayed by you that if you desire me to break away from this ideal of you, the breath of a command will send me round to your side. I am ready to give my life for this Ideal: nay more, I am ready to sacrifice you to it, since I know that life for you will remain a very bitter thing. I know, a little, what renunciation means. And I am asking you to bear it--for the sake of my ideal of you. For, assuredly, unless I can have you I must die--and I know that you will not ask me to have you. And I love you: and bless you for it. IV I have just come in from _Tristan and Isolde_. I had to hurry and be there for the first notes because you--my you--would, I felt, be sitting beside me as you have so often. That, of course, is passion--the passion that makes us unaccountable in our actions. I found you naturally: but I found, too, something else. It has always a little puzzled me why we return to Tristan. There are passages in that thing as intolerable as anything in any of the Germanic master’s scores. But we are held--simply by the idea of the love-philtre: it’s that alone that interests us. We do not care about the initial amenities of Tristan and the prima donna: we do not believe in Mark’s psychologising: but, from the moment when those two dismal marionettes have drained unconsideringly the impossible cup, they become suddenly alive, and we see two human beings under the grip of a passion--acting as irrationally as I did when I promised my cabman five shillings to get me to the theatre in time for the opening bars.