with traits that I see you do not like? Why Oswald, you understand me... the real me!—better than anybody else that I have ever met. Because I wished it... I hoped it. Because I—I could not help it. Just that. But you see the trouble is that, in spite of all... you do not wholly understand me. And... and the worst of the reason is that I am the one most to blame for it! And I... I cannot better it now."
"When do we understand one another in this life of half-truths... half-intimacies?"
"Yes... all too-often half... whether it is with one's wife, one's mistress, one's friend! And I am not easy... ah, how I have had to learn the way to keep myself so—to study it till it is a second nature to me!—I am not easy to know! But, Oswald, Oswald, ich kann nicht anders, nein, nein, ich kann nicht anders!" And then, in his own language, dull and doggedly he added to himself—"Mit használ, mit használ az én nekem?"—(What matters it to me?)
He took my hand now, that was lying on the settle beside his own, and held it while he
