ew kind?"

Rachel roused herself to respond with an equal affectation, and we made
an eager conversation about bacon and sausages--for after that startling
gleam of divergence we were both anxious to get back to the
superficialities of life again.

Sec. 4

I did not answer Mary's letter for seven or eight days.

During that period my mind was full of her to the exclusion of every
other interest. I re-read all that she had to say many times, and with
each reading the effect of her personality deepened. It was all so
intensely familiar, the flashes of insight, the blazing frankness, the
quick turns of thought, and her absurd confidence in a sort of sane
stupidity that she had always insisted upon my possessing. And her
unembarrassed affectionateness. Her quick irregular writing seemed to
bring back with it the changing light in her eyes, the intonations of
her voice, something of her gesture....

I didn't go on discussing with myself whether we two ought to
correspond; that problem disappeared from my thoughts. Her challenge to
me to justify myself took possession of my mind. That thrust towards
self-examination was the very essence of her ancient influence. How did
I justify myself? I was under a peculiar compulsion to answer that to
her satisfaction. She had picked me up out of my work and accumulating
routines with that demand, made me look at myself and my world again as
a whole.... I had a case. I have a case. It is a case of passionate
faith triumphing over every doubt and impossibility, a case real enough
to understand for those who understand, but very difficult to state. I
tried to convey it to her.

I do not remember at all clearly what I wrote to her. It has disappeared
from existence. But it was certainly a long letter. Throughout this book
I have been trying to tell you the growth of my views of life and its
purpose, from my childish dreams and Harbury attitudes to those ideas of
human development that have made me undertake the work I do. It is not
glorious work I know, as the work of great artists and poets and leaders
is glorious, but it is what I find best suits my gifts and my want of
gifts. Greater men will come at last to build within my scaffoldings. In
some summary phrasing I must have set out the gist of this. I must have
explained my sense of the supreme importance of mental clarification in
human life. All this is manifest in her reply. And I think too I did my
best to tell her plainly th