he room after
commenting upon their freedom of speech with one another, "I am not
in love with her, though I can't think why I am not."

The sequel must be soon told. Miss B---- suddenly accepted a
gentleman who was in every way a suitable _parti_: heir to a peerage,
of fairly high character.

But to return to Arthur. I can not do better than quote a few
sentences of a letter he wrote to me on the event. It conceals--as he
was wont to do--strong feeling under the bantering tone.

"As you are in possession of most of my moral and mental diagnoses,
I had better communicate to you a new and disturbing element. You
remember what I said to you about Miss B----, that I did not care for
her. A fancied immunity is often a premonitory symptom of disease:
the system is excited into an instantaneous glow by the first contact
of the poisonous seed.

"I don't know, at present, quite how things are with me. I labour
under a great oppression of spirit. I have a strange thirsty longing
to see her face and hear her speech. If I could only hear from
herself that she had done what her best self--of which we have
often spoken--ratifies, I should feel more content. But she trusts
her impulses too much; and the habit of loving all she loves with
passion, blinds her a little. A woman who loves her sister, her pets,
the very sunshine and air with passion, hardly knows what a lover
is. I can not help feeling that I might have shown her a little
better than J----. Still one must accept facts and interpret them,
especially in cases where one has not even been allowed to try and
fail; for I never spoke to her a word of love. Ah, well! perhaps I
shall be stronger soon."

CHAPTER VIII

Arthur Hamilton as an author

I must give a chapter to this subject, because it entered very
largely into Arthur's life, although he was singularly unsuccessful
as an author, considering the high level of his mental powers.

He lacked somehow, not exactly the gift of expression--his letters
testify to that--but the gift of proportion and combination.

His essays are disjointed--discursive and eloquent in parts, and bare
and meagre in others. Connections are omitted, passages of real and
rare beauty jostling with long passages of the most common-place
rhetoric. His platitudes, however, to myself who knew him, have a
genuine ring about them; he never admitted a truism into his writing
till it had become his own by vivid realization. As he himself sa