“If it was so hard for you to write to Boles, look, there’s your letter, take it!  Others will write for me.”

I looked.  In her hand was my letter to Boles.  Phew!

“Listen, Teresa!  What is the meaning of all this?  Why must you get others to write for you when I have already written it, and you haven’t sent it?”

“Sent it where?”

“Why, to this—­Boles.”

“There’s no such person.”

I absolutely did not understand it.  There was nothing for me but to spit and go.  Then she explained.

“What is it?” she said, still offended.  “There’s no such person, I tell you,” and she extended her arms as if she herself did not understand why there should be no such person.  “But I wanted him to be...  Am I then not a human creature like the rest of them?  Yes, yes, I know, I know, of course...  Yet no harm was done to any one by my writing to him that I can see...”

“Pardon me—­to whom?”

“To Boles, of course.”

“But he doesn’t exist.”

“Alas! alas!  But what if he doesn’t?  He doesn’t exist, but he might! I write to him, and it looks as if he did exist.  And Teresa—­that’s me, and he replies to me, and then I write to him again...”

I understood at last.  And I felt so sick, so miserable, so ashamed, somehow.  Alongside of me, not three yards away, lived a human creature who had nobody in the world to treat her kindly, affectionately, and this human being had invented a friend for herself!

“Look, now! you wrote me a letter to Boles, and I gave it to some one else to read it to me; and when they read it to me I listened and fancied that Boles was there.  And I asked you to write me a letter from Boles to Teresa—­that is to me.  When they write such a letter for me, and read it to me, I feel quite sure that Boles is there.  And life grows easier for me in consequence.”

“Deuce take you for a blockhead!” said I to myself when I heard this.

And from thenceforth, regularly, twice a week, I wrote a letter to Boles, and an answer from Boles to Teresa.  I wrote those answers well...  She, of course, listened to them, and wept like anything, roared, I should say, with her bass voice.  And in return for my thus moving her to tears by real letters from the imaginary Boles, she began to mend the holes I had in my socks, shirts, and other articles of clothing.  Subsequently, about three months after this history began, they put her in prison for something or other.  No doubt by this time she is dead.

My acquaintance shook the ash from his cigarette, looked pensively up at the sky, and thus concluded: 

Well, well, the more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life.  And we, wrapped round in the rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal impeccability, do not understand this.