"I confess humbly that the position which he offers attracts me. That so humble a person as myself should be elevated without any warning, so to speak, to this position--his mother is a great leader in the philanthropic part of society--is a curious freak of fortune. It is like a story-book. As for the man--well, for my own feeling about him, it is certainly quite true that I could very well live without him. I certainly should not droop and languish if he were to go somewhere else; yet--you know him, Hilarie. He is clever in a way. He thinks he has ideas about Art--he paints smudges, puts together chords, and writes lines that rhyme. He also plays disjointed bits, and complains that they do not appeal to me. That is harmless, however. His manners are distinguished, I suppose. He is quite contemptuous of everybody who has work to do. If you talk to him about the world below, it is like running your head against a stone wall. He loves me, he says, for the opposites. And what that means, I don't know. I suppose that, as a gentleman, he could be trusted to behave with decency and kindness to his wife. At the same time, I have found him, more than once, of a surprising ill temper, moody, jealous, violent, and I think that he is selfish in the cultivated manner--that is to say, selfish with refinement. "I cannot and will not be guilty of a secret engagement; while a secret marriage, which he also vehemently urges, unknown to his mother or my friends, and to be kept in retirement, concealed from everybody, is a degradation to which I would never submit. I cannot understand what my lover means by such a proposal, nor why he cannot see that the thing is an insult and an impossibility. "However, I have refused concealment. Meantime a most romantic and wonderful discovery is going to be disclosed. I must not set it down on paper, even for your eyes, Hilarie. It is a discovery of which Humphrey knows nothing as yet. He will learn it, I believe, in a few days. When he does learn it, it will necessitate a complete change in all his views of life; it will open the world for him; it will take him out of his narrow grooves; it will try him and prove him. Now, dear Hilarie, am I right to wait--without his knowing why? If he receives this discovery as he ought--if it brings out in him what is really noble in his character, I can trust myself to him. At the same time, it will deprive him of what first attracted me in him; but I must not tell you more.