“Listen, dear child—­I call you that, for though I am only twenty-five I seem as aged as the Sphinx, and, like the Sphinx that begets mockery, so my soul, which seems to have looked out over unnumbered centuries, mocks at this world which you would make for you and me.  Listen, Ian.  It is not a real world, and I should not—­and that is the pitiful, miserable part of it—­I should not make you happy, if I were in that world with you.  To my dire regret I know it.  Suddenly you have roused in me what I can honestly say I have never felt before—­strange, reckless, hungry feelings.  I am like some young dweller of the jungle which, cut off from its kind tries, with a passion that eats and eats and eats away his very flesh to get back to its kind, to his mate, to that other wild child of nature which waits for the one appeasement of primeval desire.

“Ian, I must tell you the whole truth about myself as I understand it.  I am a hopeless, painful contradiction; I have always been so.  I have always wanted to be good, but something has always driven me where the flowers have a poisonous sweetness, where the heart grows bad.  I want to cry to you, Ian, to help me to be good; and yet something drives me on to want to share with you the fruit which turns to dust and ashes in the long end.  And behind all that again, some tiny little grain of honour in me says that I must not ask you to help me; says that I ought never to look into your eyes again, never touch your hand, nor see you any more; and from the little grain of honour comes the solemn whisper, ‘Do not ruin him; do not spoil his life.’

“Your letter has torn my heart, so that it can never again be as it was before, and because there is some big, noble thing in you, some little, not ignoble thing is born in me.  Ian, you could never know the anguished desire I have to be with you always, but, if I keep sane at all, I will not go—­no, I will not go with you, unless the madness carries me away.  It would kill you.  I know, because I have lived so many thousands of years.  My spirit and my body might be satisfied, the glory in having you all my own would be so great; but there would be no joy for you.  To men like you, work is as the breath of life.  You must always be fighting for something, always climbing higher, because you see some big thing to do which is so far above you.

“Yes, men like you get their chance sooner or later, because you work, and are ready to take the gifts of Fate when they appear and before they pass.  You will be always for climbing, if some woman does not drag you back.  That woman may be a wife, or it may be a loving and living ghost of a wife like me.  Ian, I could not bear to see what would come at last—­the disappointment in your face the look of hope gone from your eyes; your struggle to climb, and the struggle of no avail.  Sisyphus had never such a task as you would have on the hill of life, if I left all behind here and went with you.