’It was at once touching and impressive to see this old man, weak as a child, the only trembling thing in a moveless day, telling these wanderings of an almost insane brain.  You will say, “But what matter?  They may not be true in fact, but they are his truth, they are himself, they are his age.”  His ninety-five years are represented in his confused talk, half recollection, half complaints about the present.  He knew my father and mother, too, and, peering into my face, he caught sight of a gray hair, and I heard him mutter: 

’"Ah! they grow gray quicker now than they used to.”

’As I walked home in the darkening light, I bethought myself of the few years left to me to live, though I am still a young man, that in a few years, which would pass like a dream, I should be as frail as Patsy Murphy, who is ninety-five.  “Why should I not live as long?” I asked myself, losing my teeth one by one and my wits.’

’September.

’I was interrupted in my description of the melancholy season, and I don’t know how I should have finished that letter if I had not been interrupted.  The truth is that the season was but a pretext.  I did not dare to write asking you to forgive me for having returned your letter.  I do not do so now.  I will merely say that I returned the letter because it annoyed me, and, shameful as the admission may be, I admit that I returned it because I wished to annoy you.  I said to myself, “If this be so—­if, in return for kind thought—­Why shouldn’t she suffer?  I suffer.”  One isn’t—­one cannot be—­held responsible for every base thought that enters the mind.  How long the mind shall entertain a thought before responsibility is incurred I am not ready to say.  One’s mood changes.  A storm gathers, rages for a while, and disperses; but the traces of the storm remain after the storm has passed away.  I am thinking now that perhaps, after all, you were sincere when you asked me to leave Garranard and take my holiday in Rome, and the baseness of which for a moment I deemed you capable was the creation of my own soul.  I don’t mean that my mind, my soul, is always base.  At times we are more or less unworthy.  Our tempers are part of ourselves?  I have been pondering this question lately.  Which self is the true self—­the peaceful or the choleric?  My wretched temper aggravated my disappointment, and my failure to write the history of the lake and its castles no doubt contributed to produce the nervous depression from which I am suffering.  But this is not all; it seems to me that I may point out that your—­I hardly know what word to use:  “irrelevancy” does not express my meaning; “inconsequences” is nearer, yet it isn’t the word I want—­well, your inconsequences perplex and distract my thoughts.  If you will look through the letter you sent me last you will find that you have written many things that might annoy a man living in the conditions in which I live.  You follow the current of your mood, but the transitions you omit, and the reader is left hopelessly conjecturing....’