The artificial and hothouse nature of the affair is fully demonstrated by the change which came over Burns’s letters as soon as removal from Edinburgh plunged him into the chilly air of everyday. The promise of a daily letter was the first to fail. Burns reached Glasgow on the evening of the 18th to find Richard Brown awaiting him at the Black Bull Inn in the company of young William Burns, who had ridden up from Mauchline with his brother’s horse. Before settling to a convivial evening Burns managed to dispatch a hurried note to Clarinda, but it was four days before he found time to write again. His next letter shows how effectively those four days had brought him back from a sentimental dream-world to crude reality. Doubtless William had brought the latest bulletins about Jean, but no hint of them was passed on to Clarinda. A feverish day of entertainment among the prosperous weavers of Paisley was followed by two days of more decorous pleasure at Dunlop House and then by another wild bout at Kilmarnock. The letter from Kilmarnock is devoted mainly to a broadly humorous account of his Paisley host’s troubles with a daughter who had been to boarding school, a son who wanted a latchkey, and himself who thought it better to re-marry than to burn. Not a word about Jean, scarcely a word about worthy Mrs. Dunlop and none about artistic Miss Rachel and poetic Miss Keith--in short, just such a letter as Burns might have written to Bob Ainslie or Alexander Cunningham, and in comparison with all the previous Clarinda correspondence as inappropriate as Falstaff in love. But this letter jars on the reader only because it is wrong in its context. Two which he wrote after his arrival at Mauchline on the 23rd jar for a different reason. Only one of these, however, was to Clarinda. She had given him a couple of little shirts for Baby Robert, who was being cared for at Mossgiel. As soon as he had delivered these and seen his family, Burns set off to interview ‘a certain woman’ at Tarbolton Mill. ‘I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her! I, while my heart smote me for the prophanity, tried to compare her with my Clarinda: ’twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender Passion. I have done with her and she with me.’