It is because it was full of moments and days tragic, bitter, sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else.

So much in this place do men live by pain that my friendship with you, in the way through which I am forced to remember it, appears to me always as a prelude consonant with those varying modes of anguish which each day I have to realise, nay more, to necessitate them even; as though my life, whatever it had seemed to myself and others, had all the while been a real symphony of sorrow, passing through its rhythmically linked movements to its certain resolution, with that inevitableness that in Art characterises the treatment of every great theme....

I spoke of your conduct to me on three successive days three years ago, did I not?
I entertained you, of course, I had no option in the matter; but elsewhere, and not in my own home.

The next day, Monday, your companion returned to the duties[49] of his profession, and you stayed with me.
Bored with Worthing, and still more, I have no doubt, with my fruitless efforts to concentrate my attention on my play, the only thing that really interested me at the moment, you insist on being taken to the Grand Hotel at Brighton.
The night we arrive you fall ill with that dreadful low fever that is foolishly called the influenza, your second, if not your third, attack.
I need not remind you how I waited on you, and tended you, not merely with every luxury of fruit, flowers, presents, books and the like that money can procure, but with that affection, tenderness and love that, whatever you may think, is not to be procured for money.

Except for an hour's walk in the morning, an hour's drive in the afternoon, I never left the hotel.