s story to the world.... And behold with what
joy I follow him, not only lovingly but sternly and severely, noting him
down as he really is, condoning naught, forgiving naught, but above
all else, understanding him--his wilful mystification of the world, his
shameless disdain of it, but the old law of interrogation, of sad yet
eager inquiry and wonder and 'non possumus' with him to the end."

This letter was evidently written in December, 1899, and the other went
to Mr. Alden on the 7th August, 1900; therefore, eight or nine months
later. The work had gone well. Week after week, month after month it had
unfolded itself with an almost unpardonable ease. Evidently, the very
ease with which the book was written troubled me, because I find that in
this letter of the 7th August, 1900, to Mr. Alden, I used these words:

"A kind of terror has seized me, and instead of sending a dozen more
chapters to you as I proposed to do, I am setting to to break this love
story anew under the stones of my most exacting criticism and troubled
regard. I go to bury myself at a solitary little seaside place" (it
was Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire), "there to live alone with Rosalie and
Charley, and if I do not know them hereafter, never ask me to write for
'Harper's' again.... This book has been written out of something vital
in me--I do not mean the religious part of it, I mean the humanity that
becomes one's own and part of one's self, by observation, experience,
and understanding got from dead years."

Anyhow that shows the spirit in which the book was written, and there
must have been something in it that rang true, because not only did
it have an enormous sale and therefore a multitude of readers, but I
received hundreds of letters from people who in one way or another were
deeply interested in the story.

The majority of them were inquisitive letters. A great many of them said
that the writer had shared in controversy as to what the relations
of Charley and Rosalie were, and asked me to set for ever queries and
controversies at rest by declaring either that the relations of these
two were what, in the way of life's stern conventions, they ought not
to be, or that Rosalie passed unscathed through the fire. I had foreseen
all this, though I could not have foreseen the passionately intense
interest which my readers would take in the life-story of these unhappy
yet happy people. I had, however, only one reply. It was that all I had
meant to