And Medora, when alone, read his letter again and liked it less than before. That night her husband was out and she began her transcription, but when it came actually to copying Kellock’s sentences, their icy restraint began to annoy her. She stopped once or twice to ask herself how it was possible for any human being to write in a manner so detached. First she praised him for such amazing power and such remarkable reserve; then she reminded herself that this was to be her letter to her husband, not Jordan’s. Jordan proposed to write himself from London. She wondered a great deal what Jordan’s letter would be like. If the letter he had written for her made her shiver, surely the letter he wrote for himself would be a freezing matter. She told herself that Kellock was a saint. She felt uneasily proud of him already. She kept his heroism in her mind, and felt proud of herself, too, that such a man was willing to let her share his future, brilliant as it must certainly be. But the letter—her letter—stuck. She began arguing with herself about it. She told herself that it was not her style and Ned would know it. Obviously Ned must not suppose that Kellock had written the letter. She noted down a few sentences of the sort of letter she would have written without anybody’s assistance—the letter she had dreamed of writing—and it pleased her much. She found such a flow of words as seemed proper to the tremendous occasion. They glittered and flashed like knives. Invective and self-justification shared the burning pages. She surprised herself at the force and vigour of the phrases. Turning again to Kellock’s composition, she now found it hopelessly inadequate as compared with her own. It was true that she had promised Jordan to post it; but she changed her mind and determined to despatch her own production, as better suited to the parting, far more forcible, far more dramatic and far more the sort of letter she pictured Ned as showing to other people, after the blow had fallen. She paltered with the situation to the extent of writing another letter embodying a part of Kellock’s. And then she copied this, and copied it again. She destroyed the debris, including Kellock’s original draft, and left one letter perfect in every way—an exceedingly outrageous production. She sealed it up and next morning assured herself that, for all practical purposes, it was the letter Kellock had designed. From a decision to tell him that she had added a phrase or two, she doubted whether it was worth while. Finally she determined not to tell him that she had altered the letter. “It’s no good making needless complications,” she thought. She was very happy and excited. She lived in a dream for a week, and the reality of the things she had decided to do lay altogether outside her calculations and anticipations.