“That will mean, no doubt, that I’m deeply demoralised. It won’t be for you, however, in this case, to cast the stone at me; for my demoralisation began from the moment I first approached you. Dear Princess, I may have done you good, but you haven’t done me much. I trust you’ll understand what I mean by that speech and not think it flippant or impertinent. I may have helped you to understand and enter into the misery of the people—though I protest I don’t know much about it; but you’ve led my imagination into quite another train. Nevertheless I’m not wholly pretending it’s all your fault if I’ve lost sight of the sacred cause almost altogether in my recent adventures. It’s not that it hasn’t been there to see, for that perhaps is the clearest result of extending one’s horizon—the sense, increasing as we go, that want and toil and suffering are the constant lot of the immense majority of the human race. I’ve found them everywhere but haven’t minded them. Forgive the cynical confession. What has struck me is the great achievements of which man has been capable in spite of them—the splendid accumulations of the happier few, to which doubtless the miserable many have also in their degree contributed. The face of Europe appears to be covered with them and they’ve had much the greater part of my attention. They seem to me inestimably precious and beautiful and I’ve become conscious more than ever before of how little I understand what in the great rectification you and Poupin propose to do with them. Dear Princess, there are things I shall be too sorry to see you touch, even you with your hands divine; and—shall I tell you _le fond de ma pensée_, as you used to say?—I feel myself capable of fighting for them. You can’t call me a traitor, for you know the obligation I supremely, I immutably recognise. The monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based if you will upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the world is less of a ‘bloody sell’ and life more of a lark—our friend Hoffendahl seems to me to hold them too cheap and to wish to substitute for them something in which I can’t somehow believe as I do in things with which the yearnings and the tears of generations have been mixed. You know how extraordinary I think our Hoffendahl—to speak only of him; but if there’s one thing that’s more clear about him than another, it’s that he wouldn’t have the least feeling for this incomparable, abominable old Venice. He would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece. I don’t want every one to have a little piece of anything and I’ve a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of a redistribution. You’ll