ght of contemned love.

"I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to
them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in
the same hour's space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and
thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes
myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise than
take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for impudence? They
found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor, weakness. I was held
to be listless and incapable of love or of steady purpose; a too active
imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt the cause. My silence was
idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by my efforts to please, women
one and all have condemned me. With tears and mortification, I bowed
before the decision of the world; but my distress was not barren. I
determined to revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine
intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy; all eyes should
be fixed upon me, when the servant at the door announced my name. I had
determined from my childhood that I would be a great man; I said with
Andre Chenier, as I struck my forehead, 'There is something underneath
that!' I felt, I believed, the thought within me that I must express,
the system I must establish, the knowledge I must interpret.

"Let me pour out my follies, dear Emile; to-day I am barely twenty-six
years old, certain of dying unrecognized, and I have never been the
lover of the woman I dreamed of possessing. Have we not all of us, more
or less, believed in the reality of a thing because we wished it? I
would never have a young man for my friend who did not place himself in
dreams upon a pedestal, weave crowns for his head, and have complaisant
mistresses. I myself would often be a general, nay, emperor; I have been
a Byron, and then a nobody. After this sport on these pinnacles of human
achievement, I became aware that all the difficulties and steeps of life
were yet to face. My exuberant self-esteem came to my aid; I had that
intense belief in my destiny, which perhaps amounts to genius in those
who will not permit themselves to be distracted by contact with the
world, as sheep that leave their wool on the briars of every thicket
they pass by. I meant to cover myself with glory, and to work in silence
for the mistress I hoped to have one day. Women for me were resumed into
a single type, and this woman I look