We parted on the best of terms. He couldn't have been more affectionate.
I will kill myself; I don't care about anything or anybody. And when
I came back on Wednesday he was gone, and there was this letter." She
produced a letter, and wept more bitterly than before.

"Let me see it."

Henrietta hesitated, but her mother took the letter from her, sat down
near the window, and composed herself to read without the least regard
to her daughter's vehement distress. The letter ran thus:

"Monday night.

"My Dearest: I am off--surfeited with endearment--to live my own life
and do my own work. I could only have prepared you for this by coldness
or neglect, which are wholly impossible to me when the spell of your
presence is upon me. I find that I must fly if I am to save myself.

"I am afraid that I cannot give you satisfactory and intelligible
reasons for this step. You are a beautiful and luxurious creature: life
is to you full and complete only when it is a carnival of love. My case
is just the reverse. Before three soft speeches have escaped me I rebuke
myself for folly and insincerity. Before a caress has had time to cool,
a strenuous revulsion seizes me: I long to return to my old lonely
ascetic hermit life; to my dry books; my Socialist propagandism; my
voyage of discovery through the wilderness of thought. I married in an
insane fit of belief that I had a share of the natural affection
which carries other men through lifetimes of matrimony. Already I am
undeceived. You are to me the loveliest woman in the world. Well, for
five weeks I have walked and tallied and dallied with the loveliest