ho ought to marry at all. You
are unfitted in body: that we once discussed. You are also unfitted in
soul: you want and you need to like many people, and a man of that sort
ought not to marry. "You never were attached to that great sect" who
can like one person only, and if you try to enter it you will find
destruction. I have read in books and I cannot afford to despise books,
they are all that I have to go by--that men and women desire different
things. Man wants to love mankind; woman wants to love one man. When she
has him her work is over. She is the emissary of Nature, and Nature's
bidding has been fulfilled. But man does not care a damn for Nature--or
at least only a very little damn. He cares for a hundred things besides,
and the more civilized he is the more he will care for these other
hundred things, and demand not only--a wife and children, but also
friends, and work, and spiritual freedom.

I believe you to be extraordinarily civilized.--Yours ever,

S.A.

Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road, Sawston

Dear Ansell,

But I'm in love--a detail you've forgotten. I can't listen to English
Essays. The wretched Agnes may be an "emissary of Nature," but I only
grinned when I read it. I may be extraordinarily civilized, but I don't
feel so; I'm in love, and I've found a woman to love me, and I mean
to have the hundred other things as well. She wants me to have
them--friends and work, and spiritual freedom, and everything. You
and your books miss this, because your books are too sedate. Read
poetry--not only Shelley. Understand Beatrice, and Clara Middleton, and
Brunhilde in the first scene of Gotterdammerung. Understand Goethe when
he says "the eternal feminine leads us on," and don't write another
English Essay.--Yours ever affectionately,

R.E.

Cambridge

Dear Rickie:

What am I to say? "Understand Xanthippe, and Mrs. Bennet, and Elsa in
the question scene of Lohengrin"? "Understand Euripides when he says the
eternal feminine leads us a pretty dance"? I shall say nothing of the
sort. The allusions in this English Essay shall not be literary. My
personal objections to Miss Pembroke are as follows:--(1) She is not
serious. (2) She is not truthful.

Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road Sawston

My Dear Stewart,

You couldn't know. I didn't know for a moment. But this letter of yours
is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me yet--more
wonderful (I don't exaggerate) than the moment when Ag