Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Was it so short? I don't remember. This one shall be longer, then. Tell me, do you think there is any use in trying to cure a person of being in love? I have come to the conclusion that it's hopeless. Such cures must be made from the inside outward, and not from the outside inward. I thought I was going to stir Vicki to a noble independence, and you should have heard the speeches I made her. Sometimes I had to laugh at them myself, they were such extraordinarily heroic and glowing things for one dripping Fräulein with none too brave a heart to hurl at another dripping Fräulein with no brave heart at all, as they trotted along with shortened skirts and umbrellas through wind-racked, howling forests. Vicki has gone all to pieces again, and her eyes are redder than ever. I don't know whether it is these November mists that have done it, but certainly after all my hauling of her up the rocks of proud self-sufficiency she has flopped back again deeper than before into the morass in which I found her. It's a perfect bog of sentiment she's sunk in now. I make her go for ten-mile walks, and aim at doing them in two hours, thus hoping to bring out her love-sickness in the form of healthy perspiration, but it's no good. 'Oh,' gasps Vicki, when we start off up the sombre aisles of pines, and see them stretching away before us into a gray infinity, and mark their reeking trunks, black with damp, hoar with lichen, and hear their sighings and their creakings through the patter of rain on our umbrellas, and feel their wet breath on our cheeks, 'oh what an empty, frightening world it is.' Then I tell her, with what enthusiasm I may, that it's not, that it's beautiful, that we are young and strong, that our life can be made just exactly as glorious as we are energetic enough to make it. And she doesn't believe a word; she simply shakes her head, and moans that she isn't energetic. 'But you are,' I say with a fine show of confidence. 'Come, let us walk faster. Who would dare say you were not who saw you now?' 'Oh,' wails Vicki; and trots along blowing her nose.