When I compare my friendship with you to my friendship with still younger men, as John Gray and Pierre Louys, I feel ashamed.

My real life, my higher life, was with them and such as they.
Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don't speak at present.

I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted.

It was intellectually degrading to me.

You had the rudiments[43] of an artistic temperament in its germ.