better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it--I shall come
after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a failure as a
wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success as a district
visitor...."

There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written
before or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them
have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly penetrating
analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.

"There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want to.
There's this difference that has always been between us, that you like
nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through
everything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendid
dream of the order that might replace the muddled system you hate, but
by a sort of instinct you seem to want to break the law. I've watched
you so closely. Now I want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, to follow
rules. I don't want to make, but I do want to keep. You are at once
makers and rebels, you and Isabel too. You're bad people--criminal
people, I feel, and yet full of something the world must have. You're
so much better than me, and so much viler. It may be there is no making
without destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing
but an instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind me--do you
remember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked
over the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I know it
disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in spite of the heat
because there was a crust; like custom, like law. But directly a crust
forms on things, you are restless to break down to the fire again.
You talk of beauty, both of you, as something terrible, mysterious,
imperative. YOUR beauty is something altogether different from anything
I know or feel. It has pain in it. Yet you always speak as though it was
something I ought to feel and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty is
a quiet thing. You have always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned
chintz and blue china and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USED
things. My beauty is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. I
know nothing of the fascination of the fire, or why one should go
deliberately out of all the decent fine things of life to run dangers
and be singed and tormented and destroyed. I don't understand...."

6

I remember ver