od battle was still raging.

You see, it was the merest piece of luck in the world that my first
appearance in Birchespool was not in the dock of the police-court. I
should have had no one to answer for me, if I had been arrested, and
should have been put quite on a level with my adversary. I daresay you
think I made a great fool of myself, but I should like to know how
I could have acted otherwise. The only thing that I feel now is my
loneliness. What a lucky fellow you are with your wife and child!

After all, I see more and more clearly that both men and women are
incomplete, fragmentary, mutilated creatures, as long as they are
single. Do what they may to persuade themselves that their state is
the happiest, they are still full of vague unrests, of dim, ill-defined
dissatisfactions, of a tendency to narrow ways and selfish thoughts.
Alone each is a half-made being, with every instinct and feeling
yearning for its missing moiety. Together they form a complete and
symmetrical whole, the minds of each strongest where that of the other
needs reinforcing. I often think that if our souls survive death (and I
believe they do, though I base my believe on very different grounds from
yours), every male soul will have a female one attached to or combined
with it, to round it off and give it symmetry. So thought the old
Mormon, you remember, who used it as an argument for his creed. "You
cannot take your railway stocks into the next world with you," he said.
"But with all our wives and children we should make a good start in the
world to come."

I daresay you are smiling at me, as you read this, from the vantage
ground of your two years of matrimony. It will be long before I shall be
able to put my views into practice.

Well, good-bye, my dear old chap! As I said at the beginning of my
letter, the very thought of you is good for me, and never more so than
at this moment, when I am alone in a strange city, with very dubious
prospects, and an uncertain future. We differ as widely as the poles,
you and I, and have done ever since I have known you. You are true
to your faith, I to my reason--you to your family belief, I to my own
ideas; but our friendship shows that the real essentials of a man, and
his affinity for others, depends upon quite other things than views on
abstract questions. Anyway, I can say with all my heart that I wish I
saw you with that old corncob of yours between your teeth, sitting
in that ricketty America