tead of forward! But this much was true at least,--I was
disillusioned forever of the hope of successfully proselytizing Bohemia
under the guise of sympathy. Mingled with the bitter tears of regret for
the suffering of which I had been the cause were resolves that
henceforth I would not sneer at conventionality and custom. However
much I might be devoted to thought and study, I would practise the
ordinary precautions of my sex, and recognize the uses of matrons.

The next day was Christmas, and before I returned from church Miss
Kingsley had called. There was a letter from Paul Barr awaiting me,--and
such a letter! In it humiliation, despair, poetry, and passion were
intermingled. Tears had blurred the pages, and I wept in turn as I read
the pitiful sentences. He could not hope for pardon, he said, but he
should never cease to love. He wished to die. What would be fame unless
shared with the idol of his soul? Existence was for him henceforth a
dreary waste; and yet his only fault had been that in the ecstasy of
heaven-sent passion he had over-leaped the bounds imposed by human
pettiness.

As I read on, his burning words seemed almost intended as a defence. He
had outraged my feelings, and for that he was to-day suffering exquisite
torture, he said; but in the next paragraph he railed against the social
prejudices of the age and the luke-warm character of contemporary love.
In another century, he prophesied, the artificial barriers imposed by a
narrow and fast-rotting civilization would be swept away by the mighty
wave of passion which, pent up in the bosoms of strong men through a
score of generations, was about to inundate the world. Under the impulse
of this idea, the closing portions of his twelve-paged letter became a
fierce tirade against the existing state of society; but the last
sentence was so astonishing to me individually, that I blushed with the
acuteness of my feelings. "Believing as I do," he wrote, "in the
expansion and overflow of the human soul, I would fain have saved you
from the cramped and bloodless nature to which you are about to ally
yourself in preference to mine. He has robbed me of you, and thereby
broken the last tie which held together our conflicting dispositions.
With him you can never be supremely happy or supremely miserable,--which
seems to me a lot so wretched that my heart, though heavy with the
anguish of its own sorrow, is wrung more with pity than with pain."

His meaning was obv