s a
handicap to a girl, so far as decent, single-minded men are concerned.
_You_ are not an heiress by any chance, are you? My annual income from
every source tots up to something like eight hundred a year, and as this
is an expensive station, and the caste question necessitates an army of
servants, it might very well be more... However! we were not talking
about ourselves.

"You are wrong about Martin, dear girl, and the sooner you realise it
the better. There's no stepping down from pedestals in opening the
heart to love and joy--the demoralising thing is to close it, out of a
mistaken sense of duty. Are these years of repression shaping him into
a kinder, wider, more generous form? Think over the question, and if
you answer `no,' then what is to be his cure?

"I expect the truth of it is that like most dear women the religious
question troubles you. How, you ask yourself, would Martin feel, if he
married again, and died, and met Juliet in another sphere? What would
happen when the two wives met?--I should laugh over that question, if I
did not guess that it bites deep, for what sort of a spiritual world
could it be in which jealousy and self-seeking counted before love! I
can imagine Juliet meeting Grizel with open arms, and blessing her for
having brought back joy to the beloved's heart; I can imagine them
united by the very fact of their mutual love; what is utterly beyond my
imagination is that having reached a higher plane of thought and vision,
there should be any grudge, any envy, any question of who comes first!

"We've got to _grow_, little girl! Plants _can_ grow in the dark;
sickly, pale-coloured things, but they cannot flower. Think that over
too. You'll find I am right.

"I'm hanged if I am not preaching, after all. Sorry! You'll have to
forgive me this time.

"Dorothea and I have had `words.' She represents that as she allowed me
to hear extracts from your letters for years past, she might now be
treated to occasional extracts from mine. From a logical point of view
there's nothing to be said, only--it can't be done. My letters are my
own. Not so much as a comma can be shared. It appears also that a
certain photograph has disappeared from her mantelpiece, and that she
blames me. I took it right enough, _but it looked as if it wanted to
come_! Give you my word it did. And it lives _perdu_ in a drawer,
where no eye can see it but mine own, and I say good-night to it every
night,