ou the loss of my whole venture
of opportunity? No, Fanny?--surely no!

"I would not be unnecessarily harsh. I am sensible of your
affection and constancy. I have deferred this explanation unwisely,
till the time and place make it seem more cruel. You are at this
very moment, I well know, awake in your chamber, devoting to me the
vigils of a heart overflowing with tenderness. And I would--if it
were possible--if it were not utterly beyond my powers of self
sacrifice and concealment--I would affect a devotion I cannot feel,
and carry out this error through a life of artifice and monotony.
But here, again, the work is your own, and my feelings revert
bitterly to your interference. If there were no other obstacle to
my marrying you--if you were not associated repulsively with the
dark cloud on my life, you are not the woman I could now enthrone
in my bosom. We have diverged since the separation which I pleaded
against, and which you commanded. I need for my idolatry, now, a
creature to whom the sordid cares you have sacrificed me to, are
utterly unknown--a woman born and educated in circumstances where
want is never feared, and where calculation never enters. I must
lavish my wealth, if I fulfil my desire, on one who accepts it like
the air she breathes, and who knows the value of nothing but
love--a bird with a human soul and form, believing herself free of
all the world is rich in, and careful only for pleasure and the
happiness of those who belong to her. Such women, beautiful and
highly educated, are found only in ranks of society between which
and my own I have been increasing in distance--nay, building an
impassable barrier, in obedience to your control. Where I stop,
interdicted by the stain of trade, the successful artist is free to
enter. You have stamped me _plebeian_--you would not share my slow
progress toward a higher sphere, and you have disqualified me for
attaining it alone. In your mercenary and immovable will, and in
that only, lies the secret of our twofold unhappiness.

"I leave you, to return to Europe. My brother and my friends will
tell you I am mad and inexcusable, and look upon you as a victim.
They will say that, to have been a painter, were nothing to the
career that I might mark out for my ambition, if ambition I must
have, in politics. Politics in a co