irs----! What days, what hours! And always you were the little
school-teacher, showing your wayward scholars what to do with life!

"Perhaps I have done with it less than you expected. But at least I have
done more with it than I had hoped. I am lining my pockets with money,
and Mimi has a chest of silver. That is the immediate material effect of
the sale of 'Three Souls.' But there is more than the material effect.
The letters which I get from the people who have read the book are like
wine to my soul. To think that I, Geoffrey Fox, who have frittered and
frivoled, should have put on paper things which have burned into men's
consciousness and have made them better. I could never have done it
except for you. Yet in all humility I can say that I have done it, and
that never while life lasts shall I think again of my talent as a little
thing.

"For it is a great thing, Mistress Anne, to have written a book. In all
of my pot-boiling days I would never have believed it. A plot was a plot,
and presto, the thing was done! The world read and forgot. But the world
doesn't forget. Not when we give our best, and when we aim to get below
the surface things and the shallow things and call up out of men's hearts
that which, in these practical days, they try to hide.

"I suppose Brooks has told you about my eyes, and of how it may happen
that I shall, for the rest of my life, be able to see through a glass
darkly.

"That is something to be thankful for, isn't it? It is a rather weird
experience when, having adjusted one's self in anticipation of a
catastrophe, the catastrophe hangs fire. Like old Pepys, I had resigned
myself to the inevitable--indeed in those awful waiting days I read, more
than once, the last paragraph of his diary.

"'And so I betake myself to that course which it is almost as much as to
see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will
accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!'

"Yet Pepys kept his sight all the rest of his life, and regretted, I
fancy, more than once, that he did not finish his diary. And, perhaps, I,
too, shall be granted this dim vision until the end.

"It seems to me that there are many things which I ought to tell you--I
know there are a thousand things which are forbidden. But at least I can
speak of Diogenes. I saw him at Crossroads the other day, much puffed up
with pride of family. And I can speak of Mrs. Nancy, who is a white
shadow of herself. Why