I put the letter in. I gummed it. Then I began to search for a stamp. I felt that I must stamp it to add a kind of security to my purpose, though the post did not leave until noon on the morrow. What a search I had for that stamp. I rummaged all my dress pockets; at last I found my purse,--there were two stamps in it. I stamped the letter carefully. I held it in my hands as I sat over the fire. Then, without any apparent reason, I tore the letter slowly up into four pieces, then into eight. Then I placed the pieces carefully on the burning coals in the grate. I watched the stamp burning and thought it was a pity to see it burn, for it was worth a penny. I saw the d e r letters of Wilder stand out white on a bit of the burnt envelope. Then I took the poker and poked at the bits of paper ash. I was thinking. All my life long I have loved everything beautiful: colours have a strange fascination for me, you could make me sad quicker with a colour than a story or a poem; scents and sounds have the same effect, the smell of violets suddenly transports me to somewhere, I don't know where, I only know it is elsewhere. I have heard things in music that no one has ever heard, notes that come up again and again as the harmony moves to the end of its story, sombre notes full of fate. I have seen people listening to music and their faces had no more expression than jugs; I have heard women talking of the opera, utterly unconscious of the story the music they were listening to was telling them. I was sitting by the fire thinking; the bits of burnt paper had flown up the chimney in a hurry, perhaps the devil had called them. I was thinking in pictures, and I felt unutterably happy and relieved now that I had written my letter to James Wilder--and burnt it. I saw my room in ---- Crescent. The creature that had inhabited that room was not _I_. I saw the room so distinctly that I saw on a shelf an old tattered book--Dumas' "Three Musketeers." I used to read it sometimes at nights, and I used to wonder how it was possible that the Duke of Buckingham could have loved Anne of Austria in the insane manner in which he did; now I saw at a glance that such love was quite possible, and no fable. He loved her because she was unattainable, she was a Queen; he could never have loved an ordinary woman like that. A soap bubble is the most beautiful thing in the world because it is so unattainable, you cannot put it in your pocket.