Dear madame (it ran),

It will be insupportable to me, after your kindness, if you take me for ungrateful.  Unfortunately, a crisis has arrived which plunges me into the necessity of leaving your hospitality.  In all lives, as you are well aware, there arise occasions that one cannot govern, and I know that you will pardon me that I enter into no explanation on an event which gives me great chagrin, and, above all, renders me subject to an imputation of ingratitude, which, believe me, dear Madame, by no means lies in my character.  I know well enough that it is a breach of politeness to leave you without in person conveying the expression of my profound reconnaissance, but if you consider how hard it is for me to be compelled to abandon all that is so distinguished in domestic life, you will forgive my weakness.  People like me, who have gone through existence with their eyes open, have remarked that those who are endowed with riches have a right to look down on such as are not by wealth and breeding fitted to occupy the same position.  I shall never dispute a right so natural and salutary, seeing that without this distinction, this superiority, which makes of the well-born and the well-bred a race apart, the rest of the world would have no standard by which to rule their lives, no anchor to throw into the depths of that vast sea of fortune and of misfortune on which we others drive before the wind.  It is because of this, dear Madame, that I regard myself so doubly fortunate to have been able for a few minutes in this bitter pilgrimage called life, to sit beneath the tree of safety.  To have been able, if only for an hour, to sit and set the pilgrims pass, the pilgrims with the blistered feet and ragged clothes, and who yet, dear Madame, guard within their hearts a certain joy in life, illegal joy, like the desert air which travellers will tell you fills men as with wine to be able thus to sit an hour, and with a smile to watch them pass, lame and blind, in all the rags of their deserved misfortunes, can you not conceive, dear Madame, how that must be for such as I a comfort?  Whatever one may say, it is sweet, from a position of security, to watch the sufferings of others; it gives one a good sensation in the heart.

In writing this, I recollect that I myself once had the chance of passing all my life in this enviable safety, and as you may suppose, dear Madame, I curse myself that I should ever have had the courage to step beyond the boundaries of this fine tranquil state.  Yet, too, there have been times when I have asked myself:  “Do we really differ from the wealthy—­we others, birds of the fields, who have our own philosophy, grown from the pains of needing bread—­we who see that the human heart is not always an affair of figures, or of those good maxims that one finds in copy-books—­do we really differ?” It is with shame that I confess to have asked myself a question so heretical.  But now, when for these