temperament. It pleases serene natures, with a streak of enthusiasm in them, such as yours, to set out on the hunt in company with a crowd. You look on their stupidities with a kindly eye; you insist on treating them as being better than they are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera: I need not fill in the picture. You love, in a word, to juggle away the aching sense of the soul's solitude by a perpetual give and take with others. My nature is different. I am atrabilious, I suppose, and find a sort of savage pleasure (I thank you for the word) in the full admittance of the fact of our fatal isolation. Do what we may, we remain individuals. The soul is never more lonely than when it seems most lost in others. And I am an individualist by instinct as well as by persuasion. The element, therefore, of cruelty enters into all I do. Oh, I know it! It did not need the gentle look of your eyes, my friend, to tell me that I was "cruel" to that poor little chit of a girl just now—cruel because utterly careless of how what I said affected her—to whom I only spoke for a few moments. The blind and unscrupulous assertion, then, of my own individuality has been my one guiding impulse, and never more so than when masquerading in the angel garb of self-effacement? I admit it to the full. In reality I have always hated life. I hate it now more than ever, because now I know that my hatred is justified by
