'Certainly; if one of your sex may with any efficacy advise one of ours.' 'Oh--efficacy,' murmured I with proper deprecation. 'But I'd like to suggest--I daren't advise, I'll just suggest--' 'Fear nothing. I am all ears and willingness to be guided,' said he, smiling with an indescribable graciousness. 'Well--don't go there.' 'Not go there?' 'And while you are here--still here, and alive, and in nice warm woolly clothes, do you know what you want?' 'What I want?' 'Very badly do you want a wife. Why not go and get one?' His eyes at that grew more hare-like than at the thought of eternal ice. He seized his hat and scrambled to the door. He went through it hissing scorching things about _moderne Mädchen_, and from the safety of the passage I heard him call me _unverschämt_. He hasn't been here since. I would like to go and shake him; shake him till his brains settle into their proper place, and say while I shake, 'Oh, little man, little man, come out of the fog! Why do you choose to die a thousand deaths rather than only one?' Is that being unsympathetic? I think it is being quite kind. Yours sincerely, ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT. What I really meant to write to you about today was to tell you that I read your learned and technical and I am sure admirable denouncements of Walt Whitman with a respectful attention due to so much earnestness; and when I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at the amount of time for letter-writing the Foreign Office allows its young men, I stretched myself, and got my hat, and went down to the river; and I sat at the water's edge in the middle of a great many buttercups; and there was a little wind; and the little wind knocked the heads of the buttercups together; and it seemed to amuse them, or else something else did, for I do assure you I thought I heard them laugh. XXXIII Jena, May 27th. Dear Mr. Anstruther,--You asked me about your successor in our house, and inquire why I have never mentioned him. Why should I mention him? Must I mention everything? I suppose I forgot him. His name is Collins, and some days he wears a pink shirt, and other days a blue shirt, and in his right cuff there is a pink silk handkerchief on the pink days, and a blue silk handkerchief on the blue days; and he has stuck up the pictures he likes to have about him on the walls of his room, and where your Luini used to be there is a young lady in a voluminous hat and short skirts, and where your Bellini Madonna sat and looked at you with austere, beautiful eyes there is the winner, complete with jockey, of last year's Derby. 'I made a pot of money over that,' said Mr. Collins to me the day he pinned it up and came to ask me for the pin. 'Did you?' said I.