Ethel Courtney a widow! Ah, Ethel! Death sheds a ghastly light
upon the idle vagaries of the human heart.
_May 15th_.--_Denver_, _Colorado_.--Magnificent weather
and scenery; very different from my own mental scenery and mood at this
moment. I am sorely out of spirits; and no wonder, after the reckless
and insane emotion of the first days of this month. One pays for such
indulgences at my age.
I have been re-reading the foregoing pages of this journal. Was I a
fool or a coward, or was I merely intoxicated for eight-and-forty
hours? At all events, Courtney's tragic end sobered me, and put what I
had been doing in a true light. I am glad my insanity was not permitted
to proceed farther than it did; but I have quite enough to reproach
myself with as it is. So far as I hare been able to explain the matter
to myself, my prime error lay in attributing, in a world subject to
constant change, too much permanence to a given state of affairs. The
fact that Ethel was the wife of another man seemed to me so fixed and
unalterable that I allowed my imagination to play with the picture of
what might happen if that unalterable fact were altered.
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