’...  Everything that he had was good, and he was such a fine handsome fellow, with such an attractive manner that to me he seemed everything I should like myself to be, but knew very well that I was not....

’I had felt from the very beginning that my intimacy with Pauli was only superficial, and I also perceived more and more that I bored him....  He liked society and I hated it.  Moreover, he was at times very irritable and would find continual fault with me; often, I have no doubt, justly, but often, as it seemed to me, unreasonably.  Devoted to him as I continued to be for many years, those years were very unhappy as well as very happy ones.

’I set down a great deal to his ill-health, no doubt truly; a great deal more, I was sure, was my own fault—­and I am so still; I excused much on the score of his poverty and his dependence on myself—­for his father and mother, when it came to the point, could do nothing for him; I was his host and was bound to forbear on that ground if on no other.  I always hoped that, as time went on, and he saw how absolutely devoted to him I was, and what unbounded confidence I had in him, and how I forgave him over and over again for treatment which I would not have stood for a moment from any one else—­I always hoped that he would soften and deal as frankly and unreservedly with me as I with him; but, though for some fifteen years I hoped this, in the end I gave it up, and settled down into a resolve from which I never departed—­to do all I could for him, to avoid friction of every kind, and to make the best of things for him and myself that circumstances would allow.’

In love such as this there is a feminine tenderness and devotion which positively illuminates what otherwise appears to be a streak of perversity in Butler; and the illumination becomes still more certain when we read Butler’s letters to the young Swiss, Hans Faesch, to whom Out into the Night was written.  Faesch had departed for Singapore.

‘The sooner we all of us,’ wrote Butler, ’as men of sense and sober reason, get through the very acute, poignant sorrow which we now feel, the better for us all.  There is no fear of any of us forgetting when the acute stage is passed.  I should be ashamed of myself for having felt as keenly and spoken with as little reserve as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any length to which grief can take me when it is about you.  I can call to mind no word which ever passed between us three which had been better unspoken:  no syllable of irritation or unkindness; nothing but goodness and kindness ever came out of you, and such as our best was we gave it to you as you gave yours to us.  Who may not well be plunged up to the lips in sorrow at parting from one of whom he can say this in all soberness and truth?  I feel as though I had lost an only son with no hope of another....’