She spoke finally. "I--we all thought--you disappeared so abruptly--what am I saying?"
"You believed that I had returned to the pit out of which you--you alone, mind you--had dragged me. You might have known me better."
"You should not put such a burden on me. You have character enough----"
"Oh yes, I had character enough, but doubtless you noticed when you first met me that I had ceased to exercise it. I went to the dogs quite deliberately, and, with my enfeebled will and frame, I should have stayed there, had not you magnetised me into your presence, where I was forced to behave if I would remain. Later, for reasons both prosaic and sentimental, I remained without effort. I have never had any real love of spirits, although I loved their effect well enough."
"You must have loved that oth--that woman very much."
"She made a fool of me. There is always a time in a man's life when he can be made a complete ass of if the woman with the will to make an ass of him happens along coincidently. I fancied myself sated with fame, tired of life, a remote and tragic figure among men--the trail of Byron is over us all. That was the moment for the great and fatal passion, and the woman was all that a malignant fate could devise; not only to inspire the passion, but to transform a frame of mind arbitrarily imagined into a sickening reality. From a romantic solitary being I became a prosaic outcast. Nor could I recall anything in the world I had left worth the sacrifice of the magician that gave me brief spells of happiness and oblivion. Nobody pretended that it injured my work, and I remained in the pit."
"And your self-respect? You were satisfied? Oh surely--you looked--when I first saw you----"
"I loathed myself, of course. My brain was unaffected, was it not? I abhorred my body, and would willingly have slashed it off could I have gone on writing without it. Either I compelled my soul to stand aside, or I was made on that plan--I cannot tell; but my inner life was never polluted by my visible madness. I have been vile but I have never had a vile thought. I fancy you understand this. And when I am writing my ego does not exist at all--my worst enemies have never accused me of the egoism common to poets. I have lived in another realm, where I have remembered nothing of this. Had it been otherwise no doubt I should have put it all at an end long ago."