the delicacy and sensitiveness of the skin. Even
conscience is a product of culture, and the categorical imperative is a
pure fiction. What a brutal blackguard of a soldier permits himself in
plundering a captured town, and feels his conscience untroubled, would
dishonor his officer to all eternity. But I am not going to theorize;
suffice it to say that that inner harmony with one's self, on which
everything depends, was utterly destroyed in me by this act. From the
way in which it haunted me, you can conceive how, in a moment of
weakness, I confessed the whole story to Irene's uncle, little
consolation as I could get from the absolution of so very odd a saint.
I saw _how_ little, when he utterly failed to understand how I could
take the matter so to heart, especially as it had taken place a
considerable time before my engagement. I instantly repented most
bitterly that I had confided in him; and his promise, never by a single
syllable to recur to it, reassured me but little.

"I was right. He forgot it himself; and one unhappy day he began, in
the very presence of his niece--we had just been speaking of all manner
of far more innocent adventures, and even these she would not let
pass--he began to refer to that wretched story. Something must have
come into my face that instantly gave my sweetheart an idea that this
reference meant something beyond the common. Her uncle, too, began to
stammer, and made a clumsy attempt to change the subject. That made the
matter worse. Irene stopped talking, and soon after left the room. The
uncle, good-natured as usual, cursed his own loquacity again and again;
but, naturally, that did not help things. When I saw my little one
again, she asked me to what his words referred. I was too proud to lie
to her; I confessed that I carried about with me the memory of
something that I wished to conceal from myself--how much more from her!
With that she grew silent again. But on the evening of that day, when I
was a second time alone with her, she told me that she must know the
whole. I could not have done anything that she could not forgive me;
but she felt that she could not live by my side when there was such a
secret between us.

"Perhaps a wiser man might have invented some story, and so have
avoided a greater evil. There is such a thing as a necessary lie. But I
held to the belief that every man is alone responsible for his acts;
that I should add a second sin to the first if I burdened th