women to misjudge each other that I believe you thought me wayward, or
at least unstable. If you did so you did me a wrong. Those two good
seasons when we met again, and this last of but a month ago, were not
accidents or fitful recoveries. They were all I possessed in my life and
all that will perish with me when I die.

But now, to tell you the very core of my decision, it is this: The years
that pass carry with them an increasing weight at once sombre and
majestic. There are things belonging to youth which habit continues
strangely longer than the season to which they properly belong: if, when
we discover them to be too prolonged as cling to their survival, why,
then, we eat dust. So long as we possess the illusion and so long as the
dearest things of youth maintain unchanged, in one chamber of our life
at least, our twentieth year, so long all is well. But there is a cold
river which we must pass in our advance towards nothingness and age. In
the passage of that stream we change: and you and I have passed it.
There is no more endurance in that young mood of ours than in any other
human thing. One always wakes from it at last. One sees what it is. The
soul sees and counts with hard eyes the price at which a continuance of
such high dreams must be purchased, and the heart has a prevision of the
evil that the happy cheat will work as maturity is reached by each of
us, and as each of us fully takes on the burden of the world.

Therefore I must not return.

Foolishly and without thinking of real things, acting as though indeed
that life of dream and of illusion were still possible to me, I
yesterday cut with great care a rose, one from the many that have now
grown almost wild upon the great wall overlooking the Danube. Then ... I
could not but smile to myself when I remembered how by the time that