They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.

But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.
Of course, I discern in all our relations, not destiny merely, but Doom--Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood.

Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its own life, or on the lives of others.
In every little circumstance in which the ways of our lives met, in every point of great or seemingly trivial import in which you came to me for pleasure or help, in the small chances, the slight accidents that look, in their relation to life, to be no more than the dust that dances in a beam, or the leaf that flutters from a tree, ruin followed like the echo of a bitter cry, or the shadow that hunts with the beast of prey.
Our friendship really begins with your begging me, in a most pathetic and charming letter, to assist you in a position appalling to anyone, doubly so to a young man at Oxford.

I do so, and ultimately, through your using my name as your friend with Sir George Lewis I begin to lose his esteem and friendship, a friendship of fifteen years' standing.

When I was deprived of his advice and help and regard, I was deprived of the one great safeguard of my life.