OH! Oh! Oh! What a storm! But are you not a little unreasonable?

You are not a circulating library, you say, nor a railway book-stall; you don’t want to hear tales of forest and flood which have no personal interest for you or me; and you cannot carry on a correspondence with a phrase-book, a thing that has no existence as a human being, and, when not lecturing you, or taking advantage of your good-nature to air boring platitudes, is doling out little stories to you, as though you were a child in a Sunday School.

My dear lady, I hope that you feel better after that tirade; but as you have attacked me with violence, and at all points at once, I claim the right to defend myself, and again I say you are unreasonable. We were never strangers to each other, or so it seems to me, but circumstances and a certain mental attraction drew us into friendship. In the delight of your society I realised what it would be to me if, through that friendship, I might win your affection. I even dreamed that I might compel the impossible, and attain to an earthly paradise of sweet alliance whence no mortal promises and no inspired writings could ever win me.

Whilst we dream of life’s big possibilities, its little duties drive us where they will. We were parted, and, if I do not now remind you of that time, it is because I know that there are few things a woman hates more than to be told she once, by word or deed, showed any tender feeling for a man who no longer holds the same place in her regard. You went and I stayed; you spoke and I believed; and what I did not say was only what you told me not to repeat, lest parting should seem over-hard to bear. Then I wrote and you wrote, and, at first, your letters were so fine a gift that they almost consoled me for your absence, and, in my great gratitude, I wrote some of the thoughts of my inmost heart. My fervour seemed to frighten you, and the chill of your surroundings came through your letters to me. It may have been the fault of those about you; it may have been that you were tried beyond endurance, possibly even that I, in some indirect way, was a cause of your distress. But you never said so; you never took me into your confidence and frankly told me you were in any trouble; only your letters went through those phases which I, once, cynically suggested were the common fate of those whose friendship could not survive a real separation. I was too slow to at once trim my sails to the varying breeze, nor could I call back letters which were already on their way. Therefore I fell under your displeasure, and you ordered me to write only of “the daily round, the common task.” I obeyed you, as nearly as I was able. When you asked me to tell you of what I saw, of what I was doing, I attempted to do so, and to make the telling as little personal as I could. To weary you with the trivialities of my daily life, to describe to you the wearisome people I met, the banalitÉs they uttered—that was beyond me. Therefore, to try and interest you, I gave you the best of what had interested me, and even that was only done with some sacrifice, for you know my time is not all my own. Naturally those letters were empty of personal reference. To have written of myself would have been to write of you, and that might have brought down on my head another storm of invective. I am in the position of the burnt child: I dread the fire. Even now I dare not accept your invitation. I might write, and, before the letter could reach you, receive from you another missive, telling me your present letter was written under an impulse you regret but cannot explain, and that of course it meant nothing. You would add that you delight in the discussion of abstract questions, and queer little stories are, to you, as rain to dry land. Then I can imagine the sternly traced characters of that other destroying scroll, in which you would sum up the tale of my sins, after reading such a letter as I might send in answer to your present message of discontent and provocation. So, I warn you. I shall give you time to think; in spite of your scoffing, I shall continue to write to you as I have done in these latter days; and then—and then—your blood be on your own head. If the outward cold of damp and fog, of weeks of sunless gloom and surroundings of rain-drenched rows of hideous dwellings, muddy roads, sullen skies, and leaden seas produce what you no doubt think is a virtuous frame of mind, when the state of the crops and the troubles of the farmers are the only matters with which a conscience-burdened woman can occupy her mind, I shall pander to your appetite, and write to you of famine and plague, the prospects of the poppy (the opium poppy, you understand) and I will even stretch a point to discuss the silver question and the fate of the rupee. If, on the other hand, you throw discretion to the winds; if in that atmosphere where you say you are always frozen, “outside and in,” you pine for a glimpse of sunlight; if you like to watch a conflagration when at a safe distance from the flames, or even if the contortions of the cockchafer, when impaled by the pin, excite your amusement;—then also I will help you to realise these very reasonable wishes. Yes, then I will write you a love-letter that will be but a poor substitute for the impassioned words that should stir your heart, were once my lips within reach of yours.

Even from here I see you smile; even now I hear you say, “Well, write—after all vivisection has benefited the race, and the contortions of the cockchafer will perhaps distract one’s attention for a moment from the eternal monotony of the narrow life.”