"I am certain that our fair friends [_i.e._ the Misses Reynolds] are glad I should come for the mere sake of my coming; but I am certain I bring with me a vexation they are better without.... I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women: at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I thought them ethereal--above men; I find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being insulted does not like to _think_ an insult against another. I do not like to think insults in a lady's company; I commit a crime with her which absence would not have known.... When I am among women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood.... After all, I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or not." In his letter about Miss Cox as "Charmian," written perhaps just before he knew Miss Brawne, Keats said: "I hope I shall never marry.... The mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things I have stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart.... These things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in." We have seen, in one of Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, that he shrank from the thought of having their mutual love made known to any of their friends. But he went further than this. As well after as before he had fallen in love with Miss Brawne, and had become engaged to her, he could express a contrary state of feeling. Thus, in addressing Mr. Taylor, on August 23, 1819, he says: "I equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of a woman; they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence." And to his brother George, September 17, 1819: "Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. A man in love, I do think, cuts the sorriest figure in the world. Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, I could burst out laughing in his face; his pathetic visage becomes irresistible." The letters to George, in fact, give no hint of any love for Miss Brawne, still less of an engagement.