The poet had a young friend named Paul, and the friendship that existed between them was deep and of long duration. Then came an actress, gay and capricious, whose past was strewn with wrecks of youth who had dared to hope, and lost. Maturity granted unto the elderly poet a wisdom that perceived the folly that followed a chance meeting between his young friend and this actress, for Paul became madly infatuated. He accepted as sincere caresses that were but the action of a playful mood, while she waited for game more fitting to her wiles. And because the poet knew her kind and loved his friend, Paul, he pretends to love the vampire in order to save that friend from the wreck he knows will follow. This is accomplished and Paul is neglected for the new man, the poet. So Paul discovers what he believes to be the perfidy of one he loved better than all else, other than she who portrayed the character of "Carmen." He never realized the poet's sacrifice. For what to the poet was but a game, a tactic to save his friend, turned to be a sincere response from a heart that responded because it met for the first time the man she trusted as a mate. Tragedy followed, for, "To play with souls is a dangerous thing," and after bitter denunciation from the friend he had tried to save, the realization that he had broken the heart of the girl who for the first time really loved, the poet is despised by both, each impelled by loathing to choose a path of darkness that would lead away from the man who had tried to save. And as the poet bowed his head in grief he tried to solve an answer to, "Which do you pity the most of us three? My friend, or the mistress of my friend With her wanton eyes, or me?"