PREFATORY.
My dear Mayne:
In these pages I give you a chapter out of my life . . . an episode that at first seemed impossible to write even to you. It has lengthened under my hand, as autobiography is likely to do. My apology is that in setting forth absolute truth in which we ourselves are concerned so deeply, the perspectives, and what painters call the values, are not easily maintained. But I hope not to be tedious to the reader for whom, especially, I have laid open as mysterious and profoundly personal an incident.
You know why it has been written at all for you. Now that it lies before me, finished, I do not feel so dubious of what may be thought of its utterly sincere course as I did when I began to put it on paper. And as you have more than once urged me to write something concerning just that topic which is the mainspring
