everything associated with you drove me wild. Oh, I have gone through
all varieties! But the last was the worst, after I heard from you
again, and all other causes were removed, and I knew that you were
well and still loved me: the knowledge that I never could be anything
to you,--and I could be so much! The torment of this knowledge was so
bitter that there was but one refuge,--imagination. I shut my eyes to
my little world and lived with you; and it seemed to me that I grew
into absolute knowledge of you. Let me tell you what I divined. You
may tell me that I am wrong, but I do not believe that you will. I
think that in the little time we were together I absorbed you.

"It seemed to me that your soul reached always for something just
above the attainable, restless in the moments which would satisfy
another, fretted with a perverse desire for something different when
an ardent wish was granted, steeped, under all wanton determined
enjoyment of life, with the bitter knowing of life's sure impotence
to satisfy. Could the dissatisfied darting mind loiter long enough to
give a woman more than the promise of happiness?--but never mind that.

"With this knowledge of you my own resistless desire for variety left
me: my nature concentrated into one paramount wish,--to be all things
to you. What I had felt vaguely before and stifled--the nothingness
of life, the inevitableness of satiety--I repudiated utterly, now that
they were personified in you; I would not recognize the fact of their
existence. _I_ could make you happy. How could imagination shape such
scenes, such perfection of union, of companionship, if reality were
not? Imagination is the child of inherited and living impressions. I
might exaggerate; but, even stripped of its halo, the substance must
be sweeter and more fulfilling than anything else on this earth at
least. And I knew that you loved me. Oh, I had _felt_ that! And the