There are, of course, whole pages to be written--if one wanted to write them--of that night on the rocks. I naturally don't want to write them. To say that I have not imagined them would be a stupid lie; I am human. But I have never been able to bring myself to the point of view of the modern lady novelist in these matters. Why is it, by the way, that God has hidden so many things in these latter days from the prudent and revealed them unto spinsters? Not that I need to rely on my imagination: Margarita would have saved me that. Once she got the idea that I was interested in those early days, she was perfectly willing to draw upon her extraordinary memory for all the details I could endure. But of course I could not let her. The darling imbecile--could anything have been so hopelessly enchanting as Margarita? It is impossible. If you can picture to yourself a boy--but that is misleading, directly, when I think of her curled close against me on the rocks, her hand on my arm and all my veins tingling under it. She was all woman. And yet who but me who knew her can ever have heard from the lips of any woman such absolute naivete, such crystal frankness? It was like those dear talks with some lovely, loved and loving child. But that, again, gives you no proper idea. For no child's throat sounds such deep, bell-like tones, such sweet, swooping cadences. And no child's eyes meet yours with that clear beam, only to soften and tremble and swim suddenly with such alluring tenderness that your heart shakes in you and slips out to drown contentedly in those slate-blue depths. No, no, there is no describing Margarita. Perhaps King came nearest to it when he said that she was Eve before the fall, plus a sense of humour! But Eve is distinctly Miltonian to us (unfortunately for the poor woman) and Margarita would have horrified Milton--there is no doubt of it. Well, well, I left them on the moonlit rocks, and there I had better leave them, I suppose. It is so hard for me to make you understand that Roger was incapable of anything low, when I am apparently doing my best to catalogue actions that can be set only too easily in an extremely doubtful light. All I can say is, pick out the best fellow you know, the one you'd rather have to count on, at a pinch, than another, the one you'd swear to for doing the straight thing and holding his tongue about it--then give him five feet eleven and a half inches and blue eyes and you've Roger. This is rather a poor dodge at character drawing: I know a competent author would never throw himself on your mercy so. But then, what does it matter? When the members of a man's own household, who have known him from boyhood, fail to understand him and take a satiric pleasure in looking at what he does from the nastiest possible standpoint (none the less nasty because it is a logically possible standpoint) why should I, a confessed amateur, hope to make Roger clear to you if you are determined to misjudge him?