"And that, Mr. Quarren, is how matters stood with me until a month ago. "Now everything is altered--even my own character I think. There is in me very little courage--and, alas, much of that cowardice which shrinks from pain and privation of any kind--which cringes the more basely, perhaps, because there has been, in my life, so much of sorrow, so little of material ease and tranquility of mind. "I had been dreaming of a balanced and secure life with leisure to develop mental resources hitherto neglected. And your friendship--our new understanding--meant much of that part of life for me--more than I realised--far more than you do. Can you understand how deep the hurt is?--deeper because now you will learn what a coward I really am and how selfishly I surrender to the menace of material destruction. I am in dire terror of it; I simply do not choose to endure it. That I need not submit to it, inspires in me the low type of equanimity that enables me to face the future with apparent courage. My world applauds it as pluck. I have confessed to you what it really is. "Now you know me, Mr. Quarren--a preacher of lofty ideals while prosperous, a recreant in adversity. "I thought once that the most ignoble sentiments ever entertained by man were those lesser and physical emotions which, in the world, masquerade as love--or as an essential part of it. To me they always seemed intolerable as any part of love, material, unworthy, base. To me love was intellectual--could be nothing less lofty--and should aspire to the spiritual. "I say this because you once tried to make me understand that you loved me. "Marriage of two minds with nothing material to sully an ideal union was what I had dreamed of. I might have cared for you that way when a marriage tainted with lesser emotions repelled me. And now, like all iconoclasts, I end by shattering my own complacent image, and the fragments have fallen to the lowest depth of all. "For I contemplate a mariage de convenance--and I scarcely care whom I marry as long as he removes from me this terror of a sordid and needy future. "All ideals, all desire for higher and better things--for a noble leisure and the quiet pleasures of self-development, have gone--vanished utterly. Fear sickens me night and day--the same dull dread that I have known so many, many years in my life--a blind horror of more unhappiness and pain after two years of silence--that breathless stillness which frightened wounded things know while they lie, panting, dazed listening for the coming footsteps of that remorseless Fate which struck them down from afar.