You told me, and I know it was quite true, that you had come back at midnight simply in order to change your dress-clothes, and go out again.

I told you at length to leave the room; you pretended to do so, but when I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria of rage you moved suddenly towards me.  A sense of horror came over me, for what exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two nights of stairs to the sitting-room.

You returned silently for money; took what you could find on the dressing table, and mantelpiece, and left the house with your luggage.  Need I tell you what I thought of you during the two lonely wretched days of illness that followed?  Is it necessary for me to state, that I saw clearly that it would be a dishonour to myself to continue even an acquaintance with such a one as you had showed yourself to be?  That I recognised that the ultimate moment had come and recognised it as being really a great relief?  And that I knew that for the future my art and life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way?  Ill as I was, I felt at ease.  The fact that the separation was irrevocable gave me peace.

Wednesday was my birthday.  Amongst the telegrams and communications on my table was a letter in your handwriting.  I opened it with a sense of sadness on me.  I knew that the time had gone by when a pretty phrase, an expression of affection, a word of sorrow, would make me take you back.  But I was entirely deceived.  I had underrated you.

You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving the sick bed, on my sudden flight downstairs.  “It was an ugly moment for you,” you said, “uglier than you imagine.”  Ah!  I felt it but too well.  What it had really meant I do not know; whether you had with you the pistol you had bought to try to frighten your father with, and that thinking it to be unloaded, you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company; whether your hand was moving towards a common dinner knife that by chance was lying on the table between us; whether forgetting in your rage your low[50] stature and inferior strength, you had thought of some special personal insult, or attack even, as I lay ill there; I could not tell.  I do not know to the present moment.  All I know is that a feeling of utter horror had come over me, and that I had felt that unless I left the room at once and got away, you would have done or tried to do something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong shame....

On your return to town from the actual scene of the tragedy to which you had been summoned, you came at once to me very sweetly and very simply, in your suit of woe, and with your eyes dim with tears.  You sought consolation and help, as a child might seek it.  I opened to you my house, my home, my heart.  I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.  Never even by one word, did I allude to your conduct towards me, to the revolting scenes, and the revolting letter.