“Berenice, I have had a dream! I dreamed that I was coming to you, that you and I were together somewhere in a new world, where the men were gods and the women were saints, where the sun always shone, and nothing that was not pure and beautiful had any place! And now I am awake, and I know that there is no such world.

“You and I are standing on opposite sides of a deep, dark precipice. I may not come to you! You must not come to me.

“I have thought over this matter with all the seriousness which befits it. You will never know how great and how fierce the struggle has been. I am feeling an older and a tired man. But now that is all over! I have crossed the Rubicon! The mists have rolled away, and the truth is very clear indeed to me! I shudder when I think to what misery I might have brought you, if I had yielded to that sweetest and most fascinating impulse of my life, which bade me accept your sacrifice and come to you. Berenice, you are very young yet, and you have woven some new and very beautiful fancies which you have put into a book, and which the world has found amusing! To you alone they have become the essence of your life: they have become by constant contemplation a part of yourself. Out of the greatness of your heart you do not fear to put them into practice! But, dear, you must find a new world to fit your fancies, for the one in which we are forced to dwell, the world which, in theory, finds them delightful, would find another and an uglier world if we should venture upon their embodiment! After all we are creatures of this world, and by this world’s laws we shall be judged. The things which are right are right, and the things which are pure are pure. Love is the greatest power in the world, but it cannot alter things which are unalterable.

“Once when I was climbing with a friend of mine in the Engadine, we saw a white flower growing virtually out of a cleft in the rocks, high above our heads. My friend was a botanist, and he would have that flower! I lay on my back and watched him struggle to reach it, watched him often slipping backwards, but gradually crawling nearer and nearer, until at last, breathless, with torn clothes and bleeding hands, he grasped the tiny blossom, and held it out to me in triumph! Together we admired it ceaselessly as we retraced our steps. But as we left the high altitudes and descended into the valley, a change took place in the flower. Its petals drooped, its leaves shrank and faded. White became grey, the freshness which had been its chief beauty faded away with every step we took. My friend kept it, but he kept it with sorrow! It was no longer a beautiful flower.

“Berenice, you are that flower! You are beautiful, and pure, and strong! You think that you are strong enough to live in the lowlands, but you are not! No love of mine, changeless and whole as it must ever be, could keep your soul from withering in the nether land of sin! For it would be sin! In these days when you are young, when the fires of your enthusiasm are newly kindled, and the wings of your imagination have not been shorn, you may say to yourself that it is not sin! You may say that love is the only true and sweet shrine before which we need keep our lives holy and pure, and that the time for regrets would never come!

“Illusion! I, too, have tried to reason with myself in this manner! I have tried passionately, earnestly, feverishly. I have failed! I cannot! No one can! I know that to you I seem to be writing like a Philistine, like a man of a generation gone by! You have filled your little world with new ideals, you have lit it with the lamp of love, and it all seems very real and beautiful to you! But some day, though the lamp may burn still as brightly as ever, a great white daylight will break in through the walls. You will see things that you have never seen before, and the light of that lamp will seem cold and dim and ghostly. Nothing, nothing can ever alter the fact that your husband lives, and that your little boy is growing up with a great void in his heart. Some day he will ask for his mother; even now he may be asking for her! Berenice, would he ever look with large, indulgent eyes upon that little world of yours! Alas!

“I have read my letter over to myself, Berenice, and I fear that it must sound to you very commonplace, even perhaps cold! Yet, believe me when I tell you that I have passed through a very fire of suffering, and if I am calm now it is with the calm of an ineffable despair! In my life at Oxford, and later, here in London, women have never borne any share. Part of my scheme of living has been to regard them as something outside my little cycle, an influence great indeed, but one which had passed me by.

“Yet I am now one of the world’s great sufferers, one of those who have found at once their greatest joy linked with an unutterable despair. For I love you, Berenice! Never doubt it! Though I should never look upon your face again—which God in His mercy forbid—my love for you must be for ever a part and the greatest part of my life! Always remember that, I pray you!

“It seems strange to talk of one’s plans with such a great, black cloud of sorrow filling the air! But the outward form of life does not change, even when the light has gone out and one’s heart is broken! I have some work before me which I must finish; when it is over I shall go abroad! But that can wait! When you are back in London, send for me! I am schooling myself to meet a new Berenice—my friend! And I have something still more to say to you!

“Matravers.”