and thought of, was entirely unknown to you. I realized that I was a
man who had tasted more or less of all knowledge, and had an
infinite vision of knowledge yet before him, and an infinite hunger
for it; and that you were a school-girl, with all of a school-girl's
tasks on your hands. So I said to myself that the reason for the
dissatisfaction was a fault of my own, that it had come from my own
blindness. I had gone wrong in my attitude to you; I had failed in
my sternness and my high devotion to perfection; I had contented
myself with lesser things, had come down from my best self, and had
failed to make you see what a task was before you, if you ever meant
to know my best self. You perceive that this is a return to my
old-time attitude; I am sorry if it makes you wretched, but I cannot
help it. It is a surgical operation that must be borne. I shall not
make it necessary again, I hope.

Now, dear Corydon, I am not trying to choose pleasant words in this
letter, this is the way I talk to _myself_. And if anything good
comes from our love, it will be because of this letter. I challenge
what is noblest in you to rise to meet the truth of it. I should not
care to write to you if I did not feel that it would.

You have had a possibility offered to you, and because you are very
hungry for life you have clasped it to you, placed all your
happiness in it. The possibility is the love of a man whose heart
has been filled with the fire of genius. There are few men whom life
takes hold of as it does me, who sacrifice themselves for their duty
as I do, who demand _experience_--knowledge, power, beauty--as I do.
There are very few men who will wrest out of existence as much as I
will, or know and have as much of life. I am a boy just now, and
only beginning to live; but I have my purpose in hand, and I know