“I am much obliged to you for your kind invitation.  I should like very much to come and stay with you, if I may come as your friend.  You must not think from this that I have fallen in love with some one else; I have not.  I have never seen any one I shall love better than you; I love you to-day as well as ever I did; my feelings regarding you have changed in nothing, yet I cannot come as your lover.  I am ashamed of myself, I hate myself, but it is not my fault.

“I have been your lover for more than a year, and I could not be any one’s lover—­no, not if she were Venus herself—­for a longer time.

“My heart is full of regret.  I am losing the best and sweetest mistress ever man had.  No one is able to appreciate your worth better than I. Try to understand me; do not throw this letter aside in a rage.  You are a clever woman; you are, I know, capable of understanding it.  And if you will understand, you will not regret; that I swear, for you will gain the best and most loyal friend.  I am as good a friend as I am a worthless lover.  Try to understand, Helen, I am not wholly to blame.

“I love you—­I esteem you far more to-day than I did when I first knew you.  Do not let our love end upon a miserable quarrel—­the commonplace quarrel of those who do not know how to love.”

He turned the letter over.  He was the letter; that letter was his shameful human nature; and worse, it was the human nature of the whole wide world.  On the same point, or on some other point, every human being was as base as he.  Such baseness is the inalienable birth-stain of human life.  His poem was no pretty imagining, but the eternal, implacable truth.  It were better that human life should cease.  Until this moment he had only half understood its awful, its terrifying truth....  It were better that man ceased to pollute the earth.  His history is but the record of crime; his existence is but a disgraceful episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets.

We cannot desire what we possess, and so we progress from illusion to illusion.  But when we cease to distinguish between ourself and others, when our thoughts are no longer set on the consideration of our own embarrassed condition, when we see into the heart of things, which is one, then disappointment and suffering cease to have any meaning, and we attain that true serenity and peace which we sometimes see reflected in a seraph’s face by Raphael.

As Mike’s thoughts floated in the boundless atmosphere of Schopenhauer’s poem, of the denial of the will to live, he felt creeping upon him, like sleep upon tired eyelids, all the sweet and suasive fascination of death.  “How little,” he thought, “does any man know of any other man’s soul.  Who among my friends would believe that I, in all my intense joys and desire of life, am perhaps, at heart, the saddest man, and perhaps sigh for death more ardently, and am tempted to cull the dark fruit which hangs so temptingly over the wall of the garden of life more ardently than any one?”