Your images hunt in couples, and it won't do, save in the Psalms. Simplicity, simplicity! that must be our aim. That makes a sentence read as if it had stood immemorially, as if it formed an integral part of the Creator's speech when He overlooked His work and found it good. (You see I fall into your trick of repeated images. Indeed, it is one of the queer coincidences of fate that our phrasing should be much alike.) This same simplicity it is which shall make Ruskin a monument of white, like an angel with carven wings, when Sartor Resartus lies howling, with none so poor to patch him. Ah! and by the way--very much by the way--don't be feverish again. Don't take my idle words of last time for more than they are worth. I told you they meant nothing. When will you believe? [Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_] Their nothing is my all. You have declared it. The words lie in my hand. Discourse to a man upon rhetoric, when your own letter says, "You are dear to me"! We will talk this out. We will, I say. If not alone, before them all. Come into the woods with me to-night at nine, and with only the dark for witness you shall swear to me love--or denial. [Sidenote: _Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume_] Was it a week ago we spoke together there by the rock, and have you changed me so? I told you that night I half thought--I was very sure--I cared, and then I seemed to lose my power of mocking you. Our places are changed. You do not know it, but I no longer command; I am beginning, the real I that sits within me, to obey. Your ways are so sweet, so tender, your truth so single, your chivalry so great! I am learning to lean on your fair service as it were an arm. O, but if I am to love you, make me good! I wish I were what you would have me be. I am not! I am not! How soon will you learn it? They talk about a maiden's mind, a fair white page; mine is all tracked with ugly marks. I am blonde, young, pretty, but I am haggard and yellow within. Not bad, you know, dear; but not the she you should have loved. Full of worldliness, cynicism, incapacity for being deceived; there's not a spontaneous thing about me. Yet, peradventure, my only hope is that I see your beauty and love it. No more of this, so long as we two live. Love me while you can, and believe it is my unhappiness that I have lived too much. [Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_]