learned enough from the despised trade of journalism to manage that. When
I return from Morningtown I shall give myself up utterly to composition.
Two or three months ought to suffice for the work, for the material is
already well in hand; and at the end of that time my pen shall turn to
making money again. I have no anxiety about gaining a modest income--and
can you imagine what that means to you and me?

I had thought to send our goblin boy into the country as you bade me, but
for a while I am keeping him here. He sleeps in a cot beside me, and in
the day, when not at school or crouching in sphinxlike silence on the
curbstone, he sits in a great chair by the window. Often when I look up
from my book his eyes are fixed on me with a kind of mute appealing
wonder. Somehow I could not let him go. He seems a link between us in our
separation; and while my thoughts are set upon rebuking the errors of
humanitarianism it will be well to have this object of human pity before
my eyes.

I wonder if you comprehend what a strange wistful letter you have written.
You are no longer merely the maid I knew, and my ways of thought excite in
you a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment--so you say. Once
more, dear girl, we will talk of all this when I come. Until that happy
day, wait, and fortify your love with trust.

XXXIV

JESSICA TO PHILIP

I have a number of terms, my Philip, with which I might begin this letter,
but I have not yet the courage to call you by such dear names beyond the
whispering gallery of my own heart.

And you wonder how I have concealed my romantic deflections from father.
Indeed, I am sure he has noticed a heavenly-mindedness in me for some time
past; but out of the sanctity of his own heart he probably attributed this
improvement to the chastening effects of a particularly gloomy course of
religious reading that he has insisted upon my undertaking this winter.
And, after all, father is not so far wrong as to my spiritual state, for
when love becomes a woman's vocation, she carries blessings in her eyes
and all her moods tiptoe reverently like young novices who follow one
another down a cathedral aisle. This life of the heart becomes her piety,
I think, and the highest form of religion of which she is capable. Jessica
begins to magnify herself, you see! A kingdom of heaven has been set up
within me, dear creator, and naturally I feel this extension of my
boundaries.

But do not expec