"Because I do not forget '_le repos est une bonne chose, mais l'ennui est son frere_.' I love and enjoy my home, but I prefer not to stagnate. Garnering the bright and charming memories of the past few days, it can never again seem quite as lonely as I have sometimes found it. I am glad you have met Professor Cleveden, who is one of my best friends. His domestic relations are so happy, and so perfect in their adjustments, that no forlorn bachelor, once admitted to his home, could escape pangs of envy. His wife is literally partner in his joys, sorrows, studies, and diversions, and their only child--the 'little maid' Violet--is spelling in the alphabet of science. Cleveden swears she shall be locked up in his laboratory, safe from the social microbes that he fancies infest the atmosphere of female clubs and 'emancipated women.' Some day I hope you will meet Mrs. Cleveden. She is very beautiful and gracious, though he assures me he has one grievance against his 'sweetheart,' and Patmore expressed it: "'Her manners, when they call me lord, Remind me 'tis by courtesy; Not with her least consent of will.'" "Father distrusts the professor, and cautioned me not to discuss any religious questions, because he considers him a brilliant casuist." "Cleveden has one apostle whom he follows at all hazards--simple, stern, scientifically established truth--and to him the natural laws are as sacred as those Moses brought directly from the same God who framed them all. For mere dogma in science or religion he has no tolerance, and I shall never forget the profound emotion with which, in a lecture, he quoted: 'These sciences are the real steps in the great world's altar-stairs that slope through darkness up to God.' Revealed religion lets down a ladder from heaven; natural sciences are the solid rungs by which men like Cleveden build and climb. Side by side these ladders rise, never crossing at sharp angles, both ending, resting at the feet of God. Up one spiritual faith runs easily; along the other some souls of different mould toilsomely ascend, each and all seeking and finding the same goal--the eternal Ruler of the universe. Cleveden scoffs at nothing but shallow shams, and we have heard him repeat passages from Job and David, then declaim from the Iliad, and declare that as between the thunder roll of Hebrew and Greek, the latter was as the rustle of rushes in a summer wind to the pounding of Atlantic surf on rock-walled shores." "Nevertheless, father regrets that you cling to such an unsafe guide." "He is worthy of my trust. Conscientiously hunting only for truth, he admonishes his students: "'Hath man no second life? Pitch this one high!' "To a young man groping in the mist of agnosticism, he repeated the declaration of one of the most subtle scientific thinkers of this century: 'That he had scrutinized every agnostic hypothesis he knew of, and found that they one and all needed a God to make them workable.'