ld that we were more
companionable, it would make many an oasis in the desert of our lives. Oh
that I could take an all-absorbing interest in patterns and recipes,
bargains and orthodoxy! Oh that you could understand my desire to feel
the rolling billows of the ocean beneath, to hear the pealing of a great
organ through dimly lit arches, or the sob and wail of a violin in a
brilliant crowded hall, to be swept on by the human stream.

Ah, thou cruel fiend--Ambition! Desire!

Soul of the leaping flame,
Heart of the scarlet fire,
Spirit that hath for name
Only the name--Desire!

To hot young hearts beating passionately in strong breasts, the sweetest
thing is motion.

No, that part of me went beyond my mother's understanding. On the other
hand, there was a part of my mother--her brave cheerfulness, her trust in
God, her heroic struggle to keep the home together--which went soaring on
beyond my understanding, leaving me a coward weakling, grovelling in the
dust.

Would that hot dreary day never close? What advantage when it did? The
next and the next and many weeks of others just the same were following
hard after.

If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but
a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few
to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could
do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of
tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be
told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.

Why do I write? For what does any one write? Shall I get a hearing? If
so--what then?

I have voiced the things around me, the small-minded thoughts, the sodden
round of grinding tasks--a monotonous, purposeless, needless existence.
But patience, O heart, surely I can make a purpose! For the present, of
my family I am the most suited to wait about common public-houses to look
after my father when he is inebriated. It breaks my mother's heart to do
it; it is dangerous for my brothers; imagine Gertie in such a position!
But me it does not injure, I have the faculty for doing that sort of
thing without coming to harm, and if it makes me more bitter and godless,
well, what matter?

II

The next letter I received from Gertie contained:

suppose you were glad to see Harry. He did not tell me he was going, or I
would have sent some things by him. I thought he would he able to tell