"And your money destroys you; it makes you less and less nice.
I am not ashamed to say that I love you, because I shall never
marry you. And I loved you much when I did not know you at all,
when you first came down from Alaska and I first went into the
office. You were my hero. You were the Burning Daylight of the
gold-diggings, the daring traveler and miner. And you looked it.
I don't see how any woman could have looked at you without loving
you--then. But you don't look it now.
"Please, please, forgive me for hurting you. You wanted straight
talk, and I am giving it to you. All these last years you have
been living unnaturally. You, a man of the open, have been
cooping yourself up in the cities with all that that means. You
are not the same man at all, and your money is destroying you.
You are becoming something different, something not so healthy,
not so clean, not so nice. Your money and your way of life are
doing it. You know it. You haven't the same body now that you
had then. You are putting on flesh, and it is not healthy flesh.
You are kind and genial with me, I know, but you are not kind and
genial to all the world as you were then.
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