“Do you remember,” he wrote, “do you remember, Myra, that time we went down into the country—you remember—under the Hog’s Back at that little inn they were trying to make pretentious? ‘Hotel Bull’—do you remember? How we laughed over the Hotel Bull! And how we liked the country outside its doors! All the world in a few square miles. Chalk-pits and blue butterflies on the Hog’s Back. And at the foot of the hill, suddenly, the sand; the hard, yellow sand with those queer caves, dug when and by what remote villains at the edge of the Pilgrims’ Way? the fine grey sand on which the heather of Puttenham Common grows. And the flagstaff and the inscription marking the place where Queen Victoria stood to look at the view. And the enormous sloping meadows round Compton and the thick, dark woods. And the lakes, the heaths, the Scotch firs at Cutt Mill. The forests of Shackleford. There was everything. Do you remember how we enjoyed it all? I did, in any case. I was happy during those three days. And I loved you, Myra. And I thought you might, you might perhaps, some day, love me. You didn’t. And my love has only brought me unhappiness. Perhaps it has been my fault. Perhaps I ought to have known how to make you give me happiness. You remember that wonderful sonnet of Michelangelo’s, where he says that the loved woman is like a block of marble from which the artist knows how to cut the perfect statue of his dreams. If the statue turns out a bad one, if it’s death instead of love that the lover gets—why, the fault lies in the artist and in the lover, not in the marble, not in the beloved. Amor dunque non ha, ne tua beltate, O fortuna, o durezza, o gran disdegno, Del mio mal colpa, o mio destino, o sorte. Se dentro del tuo cor morte e pietate Porti in un tempo, e ch’l mio basso ingegno Non sappia ardendo trarne altro che morte.