"... 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 two more and she might have been a genius. She is like the mass of women in many things, heaven knows, but her divergences are the more startling; and the point of divergence lies down in the roots of her pride. She suddenly felt the complete loss, the final departure of youth, and she accepted it like a fallen goddess, and refused even the sudden and startling renewal of Sir Cadge Vanneck's devotions. She had nothing left to give him, and although her pride may have urged her to show the world that she still could capture a man like that, I think he really bored her to death, and she was satisfied to parade him for a time and then publicly throw him over. And she once loved him, I am certain of it. That is tragedy, if you like. I fancy she has desperate moments, but she will pull through in her own way. Don't delude yourself with the notion that she is sitting down in sackcloth and ashes with her past! Those women don't repent, for they never admit that the laws of common mortals apply to them. What is their royal pleasure to do they do, and when it is over a square inch of their memory might have gone with it. To mull themselves, commit some flagrant error that lands them in the divorce court, or high and dry in the outskirts--that is another matter.