believed in pleasure here below. I believe in it still, but as I
believe in the immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal,
certainly--if you've got one; but most people haven't. Pleasure
would be right if it were pleasure straight through; but it never
is. My taste was to be the best in the world; well, perhaps it
was. I had a little money; it went the way of my little wit. Here
in my pocket I have the scant dregs of it. I should tell you I
was the biggest kind of ass. Just now that description would
flatter me; it would assume there's something left of me. But the
ghost of a donkey--what's that? I think," he went on with a
charming turn and as if striking off his real explanation, "I
should have been all right in a world arranged on different
lines. Before heaven, sir--whoever you are--I'm in practice so
absurdly tender-hearted that I can afford to say it: I entered
upon life a perfect gentleman. I had the love of old forms and
pleasant rites, and I found them nowhere--found a world all hard
lines and harsh lights, without shade, without composition, as
they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour. To
furnish colour I melted down the very substance of my own soul. I
went about with my brush, touching up and toning down; a very
pretty chiaroscuro you'll find in my track! Sitting here in this
old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty
verge of what might have been! I should have been born here and
not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things
they'd have been true of. How it was I never got free is more
than I can say. It might have cut the knot, but the knot was too
tight. I was always out of health or in debt or somehow
desperately dangling. Besides, I had a horror of the great black
sickening sea. A year ago I was reminded of the existence of an
old claim to an English estate, which has danced before the eyes