And thus I, ingenious architect of my own ruin, build up the barrier of a lie between myself and Roger.

It is a barrier that hourly grows higher, more impassable.

As the days go by, I say to myself in heart-sickness, that I shall never now cross it--never see it leveled with the earth.

Even when we too are dead it will still rise between us in the other world; if--as all the nations have agreed to say--there _be_ another.

For my part, I think at this time that, if there is any chance of its bearing aught of resemblance to this present world, I had far fainer there were none.
With all due deference to Shakespeare--and I suppose that even the one supreme genius of all time must, in his day, have made a mistake or two--I have but faint belief in the "sweet uses of adversity." I think that they are about as mythical as the jewels in the toad's ugly skull, to which he likened them.