“‘Ruth was my own girl, and a quiet girl at that, but Rawdon isn’t my boy, and we all knew that Rawdon was queer (this is the adjective she invariably applies, I find, to anything a little bit beyond her), so we got into the way of not being surprised when Rawdon did queer things. Though, I must say, this beats all. After ten years!... And he no coward either, I’ll say that for him. He was always a reckless boy, and if you’d seen the things he did you’d wonder, like I do, that he ever lived to grow up.’ “That, of course, is where her lack of imagination leaves her so much at fault. She has seen Rawdon climb into the tops of spindly trees after jackdaws’ nests, and has trembled lest he should fall and break his head, and has marvelled at his daring; but she cannot imagine, because she cannot with her physical eyes behold the torments he endured of late because his moral imaginative cowardice was so much greater than his physical courage. She cannot understand that the force of his imagination was such as to drive him away from all that he most desired. She cannot understand this, and I will admit that for us, who are phlegmatic English folk, it is difficult to understand also. We must dismiss our own standards first, and approach the situation with an unbiased eye. We must, in fact, pull prejudice down from his throne and set up imagination in his place. We must forget our training and our national conventions, if we wish to understand something alien to ourselves, something alien, but not thereby impossible or, believe me, uninteresting. “I look back over what I have already written, and am bound to confess that I have set down hitherto the incoherent thoughts that came into my head, simply because I have been afraid of tackling my settled duty. To deal with ten years—for it is now ten years since the period of our correspondence ceased with the ceasing of the war—is a very alarming task for any man to undertake. I could, of course, acquaint you in a dozen lines with the salient happenings of those years. But it amuses me to cast them into the form of a narrative, and you will forgive me if I should slip into elaborating scenes in which I played no part.