y, upon the concrete and minute detail of
social relationship) for one who, on principle, set so slight a value
on anything whatever that is merely relative in its character.

The guests, lively and late, were almost pledging the betrothed in the
rich wine. Only Sebastian's mother knew; and at that advanced hour,
while the company were thus intently occupied, drew away the
Burgomaster to confide to him the misgiving she felt, grown to a great
height just then. The young man had slipped from the assembly; but
certainly not with Mademoiselle van Westrheene, who was suddenly
withdrawn also. And she never appeared again in the world. Already,
next day, with the rumour that Sebastian had left his home, it was
known that the expected marriage would not take place. The girl,
indeed, alleged something in the way of a cause on her part; but seemed
to fade away continually afterwards, and in the eyes of all who saw her
was like one [103] perishing of wounded pride. But to make a clean
breast of her poor girlish worldliness, before she became a beguine,
she confessed to her mother the receipt of the letter--the cruel letter
that had killed her. And in effect, the first copy of this letter,
written with a very deliberate fineness, rejecting her--accusing her,
so natural, and simply loyal! of a vulgar coarseness of character--was
found, oddly tacked on, as their last word, to the studious record of
the abstract thoughts which had been the real business of Sebastian's
life, in the room whither his mother went to seek him next day,
littered with the fragments of the one portrait of him in existence.

The neat and elaborate manuscript volume, of which this letter formed
the final page (odd transition! by which a train of thought so abstract
drew its conclusion in the sphere of action) afforded at length to the
few who were interested in him a much-coveted insight into the
curiosity of his existence; and I pause just here to indicate in
outline the kind of reasoning through which, making the "Infinite" his
beginning and his end, Sebastian had come to think all definite forms
of being, the warm pressure of life, the cry of nature itself, no more
than a troublesome irritation of the surface of the one absolute mind,
a passing vexatious thought or uneasy dream there, at its height of
petulant importunity in the eager, human creature.

[104] The volume was, indeed, a kind of treatise to be:--a hard,
systematic, well-concatenated tr