, and that
she could not see me, for I was not allowed to go to her,[5] she said,
'May the prison help him,' and turned her face to the wall.

"She felt about the prison as you do, Frank, and really I think you are
both right; it has helped me. There are things I see now that I never
saw before. I see what pity means. I thought a work of art should be
beautiful and joyous. But now I see that that ideal is insufficient,
even shallow; a work of art must be founded on pity; a book or poem
which has no pity in it, had better not be written....

"I shall be very lonely when I come out, and I can't stand loneliness
and solitude; it is intolerable to me, hateful, I have had too much of
it....

"You see, Frank, I am breaking with the past altogether. I am going to
write the history of it. I am going to tell how I was tempted and fell,
how I was pushed by the man I loved into that dreadful quarrel of his,
driven forward to the fight with his father and then left to suffer
alone....

"That is the story I am now going to tell. That is the book[6] of pity
and of love which I am writing now--a terrible book....

"I wonder would you publish it, Frank? I should like it to appear in
_The Saturday_."

"I'd be delighted to publish anything of yours," I replied, "and happier
still to publish something to show that you have at length chosen the
better part and are beginning a new life. I'd pay you, too, whatever the
work turns out to be worth to me; in any case much more than I pay
Bernard Shaw or anyone else." I said this to encourage him.

"I'm sure of that," he answered. "I'll send you the book as soon as I've
finished it. I think you'll like it"--and there for the moment the
matter ended.

At length I felt sure that all would be well with him. How could I help
feeling sure? His mind was richer and stronger than it had ever been;
and he had broken with all the dark past. I was overjoyed to believe
that he would yet do greater things than he had ever done, and this
belief and determination were in him too, as anyone can see on reading
what he wrote at this time in prison:

"There is before me so much to do that I would regard it as a terrible
tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any rate a little
of it. I see new developments in art and life, each one of which is a
fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that I can explore what is
no less than a new world to me. Do you want to know what this new world
is?