Despair's Last Journey by David Christie Murray

It would appear that in the course of time Gertrude grew a little tired of Paul's ceaseless devotion. It is quite likely that she sometimes found him in the way, and she was deprived of her best conversational theme. It was of no use to try to revive the legend of the Isolated Soul any longer, because of the frequent and earnest confession which had been made of the final discovery of a spiritual rapport absolute and complete. Paul and his angel had lived on terms of so much intimacy that they had earned the right to be acidulous with each other upon occasion. Her pruderies and her abandonments of prudery afforded between them an atmosphere as unwholesome as it was easily possible for a man of fervent temperament to live in. Work of the hard and healthful sort was practically abandoned.

There was a good deal of verse-turning done, and an anonymous volume of sonnets entitled 'Dialogues of the Soul' made a momentary splash on the surface of the literary deep, and then sank like a pebble to the bottom. The book distilled a faint odour of eroticism, a scent of the epicene; but the degenerates, sniffing it, thought poorly of it because of its want of downright rancidity, and the people of whom crowds are made misliked it for a better reason. Paul, with a diminishing exchequer, found himself aware of the first flat literary failure of his lifetime.