The letter just read indicates, if it does not clearly tell, the changes that have taken place in my life; and it is only necessary to say that one morning, a few months ago, when my servant brought me some summer honey and a glass of milk to my bedside, she handed me an unpleasant letter.  My agent’s handwriting, even when I knew the envelope contained a cheque, has never quite failed to produce a sensation of repugnance in me;—­so hateful is any sort of account, that I avoid as much as possible even knowing how I stand at my banker’s.  Therefore the odour of honey and milk, so evocative of fresh flowers and fields, was spoilt that morning for me; and it was some time before I slipped on that beautiful Japanese dressing-gown, which I shall never see again, and read the odious epistle.

That some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to starve, that I may not be deprived of my demi-tasse at Tortoni’s; that I may not be forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my cat and my python—­monstrous.  And these wretched creatures will find moral support in England; they will find pity!

Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me.  The great pagan world I love knew it not.  Now the world proposes to interrupt the terrible austere laws of nature which ordain that the weak shall be trampled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the strong shall be really strong,—­that the strong shall be glorious, sublime.  A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of right, cry the moderns.

Hither the world has been drifting since the coming of the pale socialist of Galilee; and this is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity.  His divinity is falling, it is evanescent in sight of the goal He dreamed; again He is denied by His disciples.  Poor fallen God!  I, who hold nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands and feet, Thy hanging body; Thou at least art picturesque, and in a way beautiful in the midst of the sombre mediocrity, towards which Thou hast drifted for two thousand years, a flag; and in which Thou shalt find Thy doom as I mine, I, who will not adore Thee and cannot curse Thee now.  For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been greater, stranger and more Divine than any man’s has been.  The chosen people, the garden, the betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful story, not of Mary, but of Magdalen.  The God descending to the harlot!  Even the great pagan world of marble and pomp and lust and cruelty, that my soul goes out to and hails as the grandest, has not so sublime a contrast to show us as this.