I have to live
in outward seeming as do my neighbours, even to keeping a black
footman, gorgeously dressed, with bare legs.
Here at my window grows a wild aloe, and it is in flower. Once only
in fifty years does this aloe flower, and I pick its sweet verdure
now and offer it to you. There it lies, beside this letter that I
am writing. It is typical of myself, for only once has my heart
flowered, and it will be only once in fifty years. The perfume of
the flower is like an everlasting bud from the last tree of Time.
See, my Sheila, your drunken, reckless lover pulls this sweet
offering from his garden and offers it to you. He has no virtues;
and yet he would have been a thousand times worse, if you had not
come into his life. He had in him the seeds of trouble, the
sproutings of shame, for even in the first days of his love there in
Dublin he would not restrain himself. He drank, he played cards, he
fought and went with bad company--not women, never that; but he kept
the company of those through whom he came at last to punishment for
manslaughter.
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