London,         September 30, 19—.    
 
It is because you know not what you do that I cannot forgive you. Could you know that your letter with its catalogue of advantages and arrangements must offend me as much as it (let us hope) you and the woman of your love, I would pardon the of it upon us all, and ascribe the unseemly want of warmth to reserve or to the sadness which grips the heart when joy is too palpitant. But something warns me that you are of the chill your words breathe, and that is a which it is impossible to meet with indulgence.
 
"He does not love her," was Barbara's quick decision, and she laid the open letter down with a definiteness which said that you, too, are laid out and laid low. Your sister's very wrists can be articulate. However, I laughed at her and she soon joined me. We do not mean to be with our fears. Who shall prescribe the letters of lovers to their sisters and foster-fathers? Yet there are some things their letters should be of saying, and amongst them that love is not a crisis and a rebirth, but that it is common as the commonplace, a hit or miss affair which "" could not affect.
 
Barbara showed me your note to her. "Had I written like this of myself and Earl—"
 
"You could not," I objected.
 
"Then Herbert should have been as little able to do it," she deduced with emphasis. Here I might have told her that men and women are races apart, but no one talks to Barbara. So I did not console her, and it stands against you in our minds that on this critical occasion you have baffled us with coldness.
 
An absence of six years, broken into twice by a brief few months, must work changes. When Barbara called your letter , she forgot how little she knows what is natural to you. She and I have been to predetermine you, your character, foothold, and outlook, by—say by the fact that you knew your Wordsworth and that you knew him without being able to take for yourself his peace. Youth which lives by hope is riven by unrest.
 
"I made no ; vows were made for me,
Bond unknown to me was given
That I should be, else sinning gently,
A spirit."
That pale sunrise seen from Mt. Tamalpais and your voice to fierceness on the "else sinning gently"—to me the splendour of rose on piled-up of mist all for you, so dear have you always been. It rested on the possible wonde............