Do you, then, want to be pitied? I will pity you if you like, in so many carefully chosen words; but they will not be words from the heart but only, as the charming little child in the flat below us, the child with the flaunting yellow hair and audacious eyes, said of some speech that didn't ring true to her quick ears, 'from the tip of the nose.' I cannot really pity you, you know. You are too healthy, too young, too fortunate for that. You ought to be quite jubilant with cheerfullest gratitude; and, since you are not, you very perfectly illustrate the truth of _le trop_ being _l'ennemi du bien_, or, if you prefer your clumsier mother tongue, of the half being better than the whole. How is it that I, bereft of everything you think worth having, am so offensively cheerful? Your friends would call it a sordid existence, if they considered it with anything more lengthy than just a sniff. No excitements, no clothes, acquaintances so shabby that they seem almost moth-eaten, the days filled with the same dull round, a home in a little town where we all get into one groove and having got into it stay in it, to which only faint echoes come of what is going on in the world outside, a place where one is amused and entertained by second-rate things, second-rate concerts, second-rate plays, and feels oneself grow cultured by attendance at second-rate debating-society meetings. Would you not think I must starve in such a place? But I don't. My soul doesn't dream of starving; in fact I am quite anxious about it, it has lately grown so fat. There is so little outside it--for the concerts, plays, debates, social gatherings, are dust and ashes near which I do not go--that it eagerly turns to what is inside it, and finds itself full of magic forces of heat and light, forces hot and burning enough to set every common bush afire with God. That is Elizabeth Barrett Browning; I mean about the common bushes. A slightly mutilated Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but still a quotation; and if you do not happen to know it I won't have you go about thinking it pure Schmidt. Ought I if I quote to warn you of the fact by the pointing fingers of inverted commas? I don't care to, somehow. They make such a show of importance. I prefer to suppose you cultured. Oh, I can see you shiver at that impertinence, for I know down in your heart, though you always take pains to explain how ignorant you are, you consider yourself an extremely cultured young man. And so you are; cultured, I should say, out of all reason; so much cultured that there's hardly anything left that you are able to like. Indeed, it is surprising that you should care to write to a rough, unscraped sort of person like myself. Do not my crudities set your teeth on edge as acutely as the juice of a very green apple? You who love half tones, subtleties, suggestions, who, lifting the merest fringe of things, approach them nearer only by infinite implications, what have