"Dora Beadon is neither a fish nor a vegetable. She belongs to the new world which we have created in this after-Victorian era. Don’t think I complain of her hypocrisy; I suppose we are all hypocrites more or less. I was one when I tried to persuade a man with a career to marry a selfish woman, with what I hoped to be a nondescript character, because I wanted him to save the reputation of a woman who reminds me more of my niece Asenath than any one I have ever met. As Dora is nondescript, she may be amiable. But—that mouth of hers! Have you ever seen it in repose? "Well, now they are started for good or ill. I pin my faith on the man’s ambition. All life’s a compromise. No woman can have both a Grecian nose and a perfect figure; no man can have success and happiness. And success means more to a man than to a woman. If we are human, there’s no single moment in which we would not lay down the biggest prize the world can offer us at the feet of the man we love, and say, ’Please take it, dear; I only won it for you.’ But a man likes to have his prize in a substantial form, and keep it on his sideboard, so that his wife can show it, very highly polished, to his guests. Look at the presentation cups in our men’s messes! The trophies, challenge cups! Why, a man can’t even kill a big salmon without having it photographed or modelled in a glass case. We women kill our salmon every day and no one knows it. "So I dispose of Richard Farquharson. He is off my conscience. Life will give him something, although it is not the thing he wants. And Dora—she need not complain; she will have a little more wealth, a little more luxury, a little more panoply of amusement and flattery; that is enough for her. But there’s still Evelyn. "She came to the wedding. He made her—her husband. Oh, if she were only a less good Catholic! It is a magnificent system. It reduces its subjects to such a pitch of subjection that they obey in spite of themselves. The happiness, the welfare of one unworthy little soul—what does it matter, so long as the Vatican coffers are full, so long as the Celebrations on high days and festivals have still their proper number of spectators? Inviolable, magnificent, the one wall that will never be broken, it rears itself ever higher and higher as the ages roll on, cemented with the blood of a thousand victims whose names will never be written in any book of martyrology. "You like human problems, so I give you one. There they stand, the three of them, as opposed in temperament as any of the subjects in Browning’s _Ring and the Book_. I cannot depict them; I cannot even prophesy. Very long ago I found that God knew a great deal more than I did—a fact that hardly seems possible to the cocksureness of youth. So—wicked old woman as I am supposed to be by many of my best friends—I end this letter to you, who know me well, with a real pious intention.