s over it.

One can love people without knowing them fully; one cannot believe in
them without mingling one's soul with theirs; and the moral luxury of it
is so great that, when we have once known it, if only for a moment, we
demand it from all with whom we come in contact.

Roseline, all that I then wished for, that charming bond of tenderness
and confidence which should link women together, that difficult and
precious happiness which I knew for one hour through that child-soul:
that is what I am trying to offer you.

And perhaps you will have something better still, because the assistance
which you receive is deliberate and has stood the test. In the place of
that artless faith rushing to meet life, you find a soul that has been
steeped in it. Rose, may my faith and my soul be your two mirrors. In
one, you will see your forces rise even as we catch the first swell of a
cornfield at dawn. In the other, they will appear to you enlarged,
multiplied, transformed according to nature's laws, ripened by the
dazzling suns of noon, utilised by the intellect, ready at last to
nourish you and nourish others.

5

Then I met men, I met other women, without ever attaining the wish of my
heart. They came and went. But, at each soul that I lost, I found my own
a little more and I remember most gratefully those who were the most
cruel. This man was ill and unconscious of his actions; that woman was
wicked; that man too frivolous; and another was a liar....

A liar! Even to-day, among those withered attachments which it pleases
me to evoke, this last arrests my thoughts. For it was he--O singular
contrast!--who, by his lying and duplicity, finished the work begun by
the frank confidence of the child.

He was a liar.--Lying came to him so easily and naturally that he
himself did not discriminate between what he had done and what he had
said, between what he had actually experienced and the life which he
pretended to have lived. His was a strange nature, which, in its
eagerness to seem, forgot to be, a nature which, no longer
distinguishing its frontiers from another's, lost in the end its own
domain! A strange example of a strayed consciousness which, knowing no
dividing line, attributed the acts of others to itself, spoke from their
hearts and led their existences! He walked through life as one walks
through a gallery whose walls are panelled with mirrors. He could not
take a step without thinking that he was taking a thousan