He went to Paris and stayed in his old hotel in the Rue Daunou. The exhilaration of the journey, the spirit of amusement that is in the air of the city of light, buoyed him up for a couple of days. He dined skillfully and procured the glow of satisfaction of a bottle of fine wine, sought crowds and the curious company of the boulevards, but as soon as he was alone again his inflation collapsed and he took pen, paper and thick paintlike ink and wrote his first letter to her. He began "my love," crossed that out and substituted "my dearest," tore up the sheet of paper and began "my dear." He pondered this for a long time and wrote his initials and circles and squares on the paper, as it dawned on him that for the first time for nearly thirty years--well over twenty, at any rate--he was writing a love letter, that it had to be written, and that the last series upon which he had embarked was no sort of model for this. He chewed the ends and ragged threads of folly of his twenties and was astonished at the small amount of truth and genuine affection he could find in them, wondered, too, what had become of the waters of the once so easily tapped spring of ardor and affection. It seemed to him that he could mark the very moment of its subterranean plunge. It had been, had it not, when he had made his fruitless effort to escape from Thrigsby, when he had applied--in vain--for the Australian professorship. Then he had shut and locked the door upon himself, and he remembered clearly the day, at the beginning of term, when he had, with glowing excitement and a sort of tragical humor, saluted his Form Room as his lasting habitation. . . . Once more he scratched H. J. B. on the paper before him, but saw it not, for clearly in his mind was the vision of Matilda, lying in her bed with her hair thrown back over her pillow and her hand beneath her cheek, and the whiteness of her throat and the slenderness of her arms, the scent of her hair. . . . His heart was full again. He took another sheet of paper, and, with no picking of phrases, he wrote: "My little one. Are there still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? There are still the bruises of my own obstinacy upon my barren old heart. I am here, miles away from you, in another country, but I am more with you than I have ever been. What a burden I must have been upon you! It must have been that I must selfishly have felt that. One would suffer more from being a burden than from bearing a burden. (And you said: 'Who will look after you?' I think that rasped my blown vanity more than anything.) One would suffer more, I say, if one were a withered, parched, tedious old egoist, as I am. Tell me, are there still the marks of your tears on your cheeks? I cannot bear not to know. I love you. Now I know that I love you. If this world were fairyland, you would love me. But this world is this world. And it is the richer, as I am, by my love for you. H. J. B."