XI

One knows not whether there can be human compassion for anemia of the
soul. When the pitch of Life is dropped, and the spirit is so put over
and reversed that that only is horrible which before was sweet and
worldly and of the day, the human relation disappears. The sane soul
turns appalled away, lest not merely itself, but sanity should suffer.
We are not gods. We cannot drive out devils. We must see selfishly
to it that devils do not enter into ourselves.

And this we must do even though Love so transfuse us that we may well
deem our nature to be half divine. We shall but speak of honour and duty
in vain. The letter dropped within the dark door will lie unregarded, or,
if regarded for a brief instant between two unspeakable lapses, left and
forgotten again. The telegram will be undelivered, nor will the whistling
messenger (wiselier guided than he knows to whistle) be conscious as he
walks away of the drawn blind that is pushed aside an inch by a finger
and then fearfully replaced again. No: let the miserable wrestle with his
own shadows; let him, if indeed he be so mad, clip and strain and enfold
and couch the succubus; but let him do so in a house into which not an
air of Heaven penetrates, nor a bright finger of the sun pierces the
filthy twilight. The lost must remain lost. Humanity has other business
to attend to.

For the handwriting of the two letters that Oleron, stealing noiselessly
one June day into his kitchen to rid his sitting-room of an armful of
fetid and decaying flowers, had seen on the floor within his door, had
had no more meaning for him than if it had belonged to some dim and
faraway dream. And at the beating of the telegraph-boy upon the door,