Once when I was climbing with a friend of mine in the
Engadine, we saw a white flower growing virtually out of a
cleft in the rocks, high above our heads. My friend was a
botanist, and he would have that flower! I lay on my back
and watched him struggle to reach it, watched him often
slipping backwards, but gradually crawling nearer and
nearer, until at last, breathless, with torn clothes and
bleeding hands, he grasped the tiny blossom, and held it out
to me in triumph! Together we admired it ceaselessly as we
retraced our steps. But as we left the high altitudes and
descended into the valley, a change took place in the
flower. Its petals drooped, its leaves shrank and faded.
White became grey, the freshness which had been its chief
beauty faded away with every step we took. My friend kept
it, but he kept it with sorrow! It was no longer a beautiful
flower.

"Berenice, you are that flower! You are beautiful, and pure,
and strong! You think that you are strong enough to live in
the lowlands, but you are not! No love of mine, changeless
and whole as it must ever be, could keep your soul from
withering in the nether land of sin! For it would be sin!
In these days when you are young, when the fires of your
enthusiasm are newly kindled, and the wings of your
imagination have not been shorn, you may say to yourself
that it is not sin! You may say that love is the only true
and sweet shrine before which we need keep our lives holy
and pure, and that the time for regrets would never come!

"Illusion! I, too, have tried to reason with myself in this
manner! I have tried passionately, earnestly, feverishly. I
have failed! I cannot! No one can! I know that to you I seem
to be writing like a Philistine, like a man of a generation
gone by! You have filled your little world with new ideals,
you have lit it with the lamp of love, and it all seems very
real and beautiful to you! But some day, though the lamp may
burn still as brightly as ever, a great white daylight will
break in through the walls. You will see things that you
have never seen before, and the light of that lamp will seem
cold and dim and ghostly. Nothing, nothing can ever alter
the fact that your husband lives, and that your little boy
is growing up with a great void in his