The present letter thralled him. It was blithe in intent, but intuitively deep and keen. In a former letter, he had asked if there were not a strain of Irish in her lineage, so mercurial did her temperament play in all that she wrote. "No Irish," she had answered. "Dutch--straight Dutch. Always New York--always Dutch. I praise Providence for this 'monkey-wrench to hang upon my safety valve.'" The "red moon" letter seemed to have caught her on the wing--at her highest and happiest--for she answered it in fine faith and lightness. Though it had carried her up and up; and though the singing came back from golden azure, yet she had not forgotten her humor. There was a suggestion of world-wisdom here, or was it world-wear? For hours at a time, Charter was now stripped of his capacity for work. This is fine torment. Mostly there was a sheet in his type-mill, but his fingers only fluttered the space-bar. Let him begin a letter to the Skylark, however, and inspiration came, indeed. His thoughts marshalled like a perfect army then, and passed out from under his hand in flashing review.... He ate little, slept little, but his vitality was prodigious. A miracle matured in his breast. Had he not been more than usually stubborn, he would have granted long before, that he loved a woman for the first time in his life--and this a woman he had never seen. By New Year's there was no dissembling. No day passed now in which he did not battle down an impulse to take a train for New York. This was real living. The destiny which had ruled him through so many dark wanderings, had waited until his soul was roused to dominance, before he was permitted to enter earth's true treasury. It was now that he remembered his past, and many a mile and many an hour he paced the dim hall--wrestling to be clean of it. This was a Soul which called. He did not dare to answer while a vestige of the old taints lingered.... He was seldom troubled that she might prove less inspiring than he pictured. He staked every reliance in that he had lived thirty-three years and encountered nothing comparable with this before. Passions, fascinations, infatuations, were long put behind; these were classed now in his mind beneath decent and frictionless partnerships between men and women. The vision which inspired his romantic loneliness was all that Reifferscheid had suggested, and infinitely more which his own dreamings had supplied. She was an adult frankly challenged by the mysteries of creation; often shocked by its revelations, never above pity nor beneath humor, wonderful in her reality of culture, and wise above men with a woman's divination. But particularly, her ultimate meaning was for _him_; his quest, she was; his crown, to be. The world had preserved her singing, until he was ready; and though singing, she must ever feel the poverty of unfulfilment in her own breast, until he came. This was the stately form of the whole enchantment.