I conceive, perhaps, that his outraged ideal was too strong for his power of forgiveness.

He was very fastidious, always.
How deep the blow cut will be shown by these following extracts: "I once had my faith in human nature rudely wrecked, and it has never attempted a long voyage again.

I hug the coast and look regretfully out to sea; perhaps the day may come when I may strike into it ...
believe in it always if you can; I do not say it is vanity ...

the shock blinded me; I can not see if I would." And again-- "Moral wounds never heal; they may be torn open by a chance word, by a fragment of print, by a sentence from a letter; and there we have to sit with pale face and shuddering heart, to bleed in silence and dissemble it.

Then, too, there is that constant dismal feeling which the Greeks called [Greek: upoulos]: the horrible conviction, the grim memory lurking deep down, perhaps almost out of sight, thrust away by circumstance and action, but always ready to rise noiselessly up and draw you to itself." "'A good life, and therefore a happy one,' says my old aunt, writing to me this morning; it is marvellous and yet sustaining what one can pass through, and yet those about you--those who suppose that they have the key, if any, to your heart--be absolutely ignorant of it.
'He looks a little tired and worn: he has been sitting up late;' 'all young men are melancholy: leave him alone and he will be better in a year or two,' was all that was said when I was actually meditating suicide--when I believe I was on the brink of insanity." All these extracts are from letters to myself at different periods.
Taking them together, and thus arranged, my case seems irresistible; still I must concede that it is all theory--all inference: I do not wholly know the facts, and never shall..