othing else so fans the flame of a young man's
fancy as being forbidden all access to its object. Accordingly, in the
weeks which followed that Sunday at Weybridge, I began an ardent
correspondence with Sylvia, after inducing her to arrange to call for
letters at a certain newspaper shop not far from the station.

It was a curious correspondence in many ways. Some of my long, wordy
epistles were indited from the reporters' room at the _Daily Gazette_
office, in the midst of noisy talk and the hurried production of "copy."
Others, again, were produced, long after--for my health's sake--I should
have been in bed; and these were written on a corner of my little chest
of drawers in the Bloomsbury lodging-house. I was a great reader of the
poet Swinburne at the time, and I doubt not my muse was sufficiently
passionate seeming. But, though I believe my phrases of endearment were
alliteratively emphatic, and even, as I afterwards learned, somewhat
alarming to their recipient, yet the real mainspring of my eloquence was
the difference between our respective views of life, Sylvia's and mine.

In short, before very long my letters resolved themselves into fiery and
vehement denunciation of Sylvia's particular and chosen _metier_ in
religion, and equally vehement special pleading on behalf of the claims
of humanity and social reform, as I saw them. I find the thing
provocative of smiles now, but I was terribly in earnest then, or
thought so, and had realized nothing of the absolute futility of pitting
temperament against temperament, reason against conviction, argument
against emotional belief.

We had some stolen meetings, too, in the evenings, I upon one side of a
low garden wall, Sylvia upon the other. Stolen meetings are apt to be
very sweet and stirring to young blood; but the sordid consideration of
the railway fare to Weybridge forbade frequent indulgence, and such was
my absorption in social questions, such my growing hatred of Sylvia's
anti-human form of religion, that even here I could not altogether
forbear from argument. Indeed, I believe I often left poor Sylvia weary
and bewildered by the apparently crushing force of my representations,
which, while quite capable of making her pretty head to ache, left her
mental and emotional attitude as completely untouched as though I had
never opened my lips.

Wrought up by means of my own eloquence, I would make my way back to
London in a hot tremor of exaltation, which I too