ever want to marry me now, because I have been engaged.' Well, love is a cruel, horrible thing. Hardly ever do both the persons love with equal enthusiasm, and if they do what is the use? It is all bound to end in smoke and nothingness, put out by the steady drizzle of marriage. And for the others, for the masses of people who do not love equally, of whom one half is at a miserable disadvantage, at the mercy absolutely of the other half, what is there but pain in the end? And yet--and yet it is a pretty thing in its beginnings, a sweet, darling thing. But, like a kitten, all charm and delicious ways at first, innocent, soft, enchanting, it turns into a cat with appalling rapidity and cruelly claws you. I'd like to know if there's a single being on earth so happy and so indifferent that he has not got hidden away beneath a brave show of clothes and trimmings the mark of Love's claws. And I think most of the clawings are so ferocious that they are for a long time ghastly tears that open and bleed again; and when with years they slowly dry up there is always the scar, red and terrible, that makes you wince if by any chance it is touched. That is what I think. What do you think? Good-by. No, don't tell me what you think. I don't want to know. XLVI Galgenberg, Sept. 24th. Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Yesterday I was so much absorbed by Vicki's woes that I never got to what I really wanted to write about. It's that book I found in the Jena bookshop. It was second-hand and cheap, and I bought it, and it has unkindly revenged itself by playing havoc with my illusions. It is a collection of descriptions of what is known of the lives of the English poets, beginning with Chaucer, who is luckily too far away to provide much tattle, and coming down the centuries growing bigger with gossip as it comes, till it ends with Rossetti, and FitzGerald, and Stevenson. Each poet has his portrait. It was for that I bought it. I cannot tell you how eagerly I looked at them. At last I was going to see what Wordsworth looked like, and Coleridge, and Keats, and Shelley. One of my dreams has been to go to that National Portrait Gallery of yours in London, described in an old Baedeker I once saw, and gaze at the faces of those whose spirits I know so well. Now I don't want to. Can you imagine what it is like, what an extremely blessed state it is, only to have read the works of a poet, the filtered-out best of him, and to have lived so far from his country and from biographies or collections of his letters that all gossip about his private life and criticisms of his morals are unknown to you? Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Burns, have been to me great teachers, great examples, before whose shining image, built up out of the radiant materials their works provided, I have spent glorious hours in worship. Not a cloud, not a misgiving has dimmed my worship. We need altars--anyhow we women do--and they were mine--I have not been able to