... Oh, Dicky, there is no other way. I’ve tried to dodge it, but it has to be told now, that I have taken Rufus Melton. Why did I do it? I don’t know, unless it is that I am evil and unfinished and answer to the evil and unfinished in him. He draws me terribly, but at the same time, I am not deluded. There is never a moment with him that is not unmixed with pain.... I wonder if you can believe that I did not do this thing for happiness; that the happiest moments I have ever known have come from my work with John Higgins and my friendship with you? And can you ever believe that I am no farther from you now, in that mysterious comrade way?... Oh, Life is not like books, Dicky, not at all like what we are taught it is. I have a relation to him. I answer some terrible drawing need--like a child crying for me. But I have a relation to you, too, only different. You mean rest, something done. He means the unfinished. He brings a mirror to me, and says, “Look!” I want to scream, because the mirror brings out all my defects. That’s what his presence means.... This is one true thing, Dicky. The one who can rouse the most hell in your breast is the one to whom you belong for the time. At least, that is true to me.... Have I not been grateful for your stability? And have I not been proud for your moving so quietly up and down the East, keeping your surfaces clean for the world events to be pictured there without twist or falsehood?... A strange door was opened in my being when I was a child. In and out that door, whether I will or not, you often come and go. “He is my friend,” I whisper, “my friend”----and repeat it a thousand times. XXIII THE RED ROOM LINE by line the thing was killing him. He got up and crossed the heavy red carpet to the hall door and turned the key in the lock. He was afraid some one would come in and find him. He had the strange power of partly seeing himself, as the sullen horrors of hatred and revolt boiled up in his breast. Vaguely, but quite well enough, he could watch the man called Richard Cobden in the dim hotel room, the shoulders hunched, the mouth stretched and crooked; unable to sit still, the face wet with poisonous sweat. The love had gone out of him, and with it, all the light he had. He thought he had known pain and loneliness since leaving New York, but all he had known was humming content compared to now, because there had been a laughing idolatry for all her ways and words, a reliance upon her that he had dared to call absolute. “Understand, understand!” she had cried all through the letter.... Oh yes, he could understand. She wasn’t what he had made her out to be--that was clear enough. He had built upon something which wasn’t there. He had believed her to be--built into himself the conviction--that she was the honestest thing alive, and here she was----