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 garland my thoughts and feelings. It was happiness I felt at the moment. I felt so free and light-hearted. Just as if I was born again with new strength and new hopes.

'But when a short while ago I sat down to write this letter I realised that the hardest task was still undone.

'For the point is that I have nothing at all to reproach you with. On the contrary, I have only to thank you again and again for all the beauty you brought me, and for all your sweet love.

'Yet I come to you saying it is over, I am weary. You must set me free, however hard and unjust it seems to you. But the most despairing part of it all is that most likely you will not be able to understand it at all. You will only understand that I have failed you in spite of all your great love, and you will either think that I am acting through madness, or that I have hitherto lived like a scoundrel. Yet the truth is that I am neither a madman nor a liar, but a liberty-sick man whose mind and soul become paralysed the moment he feels himself hemmed in by a relationship.

'You see when you and I first met, neither of us fancied it would mean more than a moment's fleeting and untrammelled joy. It was a caprice, an irresistible impulse in us both with no thought of a binding or constant relationship, let alone eternal love.

'Then it happened that we really fell in love with one another. That I have loved you, I need scarcely