"You are mad, and gone the wrong way. You take falsehood for truth and
ugliness for beauty. You would marvel if suddenly apple and orange
trees should bear frogs and lizards instead of fruit, and if roses
should begin to breathe the odour of a sweating horse. So do I marvel
at you, who have bartered heaven for earth. I do not want to
understand you.
"That I may show you in deed my contempt for that by which you live, I
waive the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise, and
which I now despise. That I may deprive myself of my right to them, I
shall come out from here five minutes before the stipulated term, and
thus shall violate the agreement."
When he had read, the banker put the sheet on the table, kissed the
head of the strange man, and began to weep. He went out of the wing.
Never at any other time, not even after his terrible losses on the
Exchange, had he felt such contempt for himself as now. Coming home,
he lay down on his bed, but agitation and tears kept him a long time
from sleeping...
The next morning the poor watchman came running to him and told him
that they had seen the man who lived in the wing climb through the
window into the garden.
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