ot. Think it over,
dear Isabel.... Julia Kaye, I happen to know, has been trying to get his
address. So far, she has not landed another big fish, and no doubt
thinks that Jack's disgust and enthusiasm have both worn themselves out
by this time. Don't send him back, but bring him. Of course he has
fallen in love with you. Besides, you could accomplish any mortal thing
you put your will to. Do, please, think it all over. A few years' delay,
and he might return and find it too late. The public memory is short.
There are rivals. The one he had most to fear from has an
Under-secretaryship, and lets no one forget him. There will be deep
resentment at too long an absence, especially if he should become an
American citizen meanwhile. They would never forgive that.

"... About Vicky. I wish I could have gone with her, but she did not
feel that she could afford to take me, and Vicky's spasms of economy are
not to be discouraged. But, thank heaven, she has you and Jack. Perhaps
all she really needed was a change: she was always an individual, but
she got to be distinctly peculiar after you left--nerves, I suppose:
only instead of being merely irritable like other women she sealed
herself up like a Mahatma preparing for astral flight. I only wish she
was one. Women of her class no longer take to religion, when the fires
are dead, but they certainly need a substitute, and I should think
theosophy would be as good as any. It is such a delightful mixture of
vagueness and cock-sureness, and even more picturesque than Romanism. It
is time for me to follow the fashion and write a book, and I think I'll
paint the mysterious delights of India as a late autumn resort. I am so
sick of all these public mausoleums for youth! It would be a positive
relief to think of all our erstwhile beauties stretched out in some
frescoed cave with their ears and eyes and noses sealed up with wax,
while their ever-youthful spirits sallied forth for new conquests on the
astral plane. But Vicky never 'made up': one must say that much for her.
Only this terrible fetish of youth! Heavens! the tragedies my
sympathetic soul has endeavored to see as tragedies only. Not that
growing old seems to be the worst of it. The underlying tragedy is that
they can't care enough, and this they take to be the real end of youth,
and patter up and down the old worn-out track of device, trying to fool
themselves as well as others. But Vicky, as I said, is an individual: a
touch or