"Good-bye, my dear father. I was your first disappointment, but in the end you and I recognised each other. That is permanent. It will be with me wherever I go, with you to the end of your life. You are of those who believe that understanding is not given to us. Your belief must be a bitter comfort to you. I believe that men are rapidly coming to an end of their material activity so that soon they will be forced to find understanding or perish. . . . Do you remember a night when you and I watched the rest acting an absurd play, and I said involuntarily, 'Round the corner'? Modern life is theatrical. Everybody is playing a part, because they are without understanding. Life for modern men and women is for ever round the corner because they attempt to tackle their affairs with the minds of children, children who believe everything they are told and examine nothing. They play with everything. They can do nothing else. Unhappily, life is a serious business which yields its reward of joy only to simplicity, sincerity, and purity, or, if you like the old trinity better--faith, hope, and charity. The old beliefs are true--nearly all that you preach, I mean; but from repetition they have become stale and meaningless. They need restatement. . . . I am going back to the sea, not because I believe that the 'great wide spaces of the earth'--what a lot of twaddle is talked about them!--have a monopoly of truth, but because I must move and keep moving. It is in the air. Perhaps I feel it before other men. The salvation of human life lies in movement, circulation. . . . More simply and less philosophically I am going because it amuses me to go. I like passing through the world saluting the few men of courage and good heart whom one can find, and, of such men, my dear father, I count you not the least." Francis kept this letter and through his hours of torment often read it. It let in air. XXXII THE CUTTING OF A KNOT _Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth._ ISAIAH, xxiv. 17. IT is one of the most disconcerting phenomena of existence that, when passionate love has answered its purpose, it simply disappears, leaving its instruments wedded by such truth as they have discovered in each other or divorced by the lies they have forged for each other's delight. Very rarely, however, is the issue so simple. The bone-and-shadow business comes into play here also, and most people marry with very little passionate love and a great deal of careful imitation of it, so that most marriages are strangled in their birth with a very tangled web of lies.