can tell. Dear Jacqueline, I had left one thing out of my calculations in building this fool’s paradise.”

“And that?” Jacqueline looked troubled. I know she pitied me.

“I had forgotten that one may love.”

I leaned over toward her. Regardless of 11Pietro, who, I knew, was squinting through the red and white striped awning, I took her hand. “Dear Jacqueline, do you think that it is too late for me to begin again?”

11

Jacqueline was silent. She withdrew her hand gently. I had felt it tremble in mine.

“Do you see now that I am answering your question?” I asked. “When I was in New York, and knew at last that I should always love you, I had to keep reminding myself that this was my world. I had set before myself an ideal. I must be faithful to it. So, now, when you are in Venice, I have tried to remind myself just as strongly that you come from the world of the penny steamboat and factory–a workaday world–a relentless world. In that world men tear and rend one another for a name, for a position. Each one is for himself, ruthless of others, unscrupulous often. Each one strives madly for something that is just out of his reach. That is the world you come from. I have reminded myself of it over and over. But it’s no use. I can’t keep silent. I must speak. Jacqueline, I love you.”

She sat motionless. Her eyes looked out on the lagoon. Then she clasped her knees, and looked at me with a curious intentness. When she did speak, it was so slowly, so decisively that her words sounded like an inexorable fate.

12“My dear Richard, you are an extraordinary man. You are one of the rare specimens who hold a perfectly impossible ideal. When you fail to attain that ideal, you frankly abandon yourself to materialism–a materialism that smothers you. You have not even attempted to play the man. It is incredible that you should deliberately lay yourself down to loll on a flowery bed of ease for three years. Your very last words about my poor world show how great a gulf is fixed between you and me. Yes, I am of that world. I glory in it. But you sneer at the very qualities you lack. That is so easy, and, forgive me, so weak. You call my poor world ruthless. But often ruthlessness, yes, and unscrupulousness even, go with strength. The man I love must have a touch of this relentlessness you despise. Better that he be unscrupulous than weak. And as for 

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