“I’ve so much to tell you, and yet it comes down to one very simple thing. I’ve found, I believe, already the very soul I set out to find, set out with yours and Anna’s blessing, remember. You mayn’t tell her yet. It’s too soon and it may so easily come to nothing, but I do believe that if I’d searched England through and through for many years I could never have found anyone so—so—exactly what I need. You must have guessed in that very first letter that it had, even then, begun. It began from the instant that I saw her—it seems to me now to be as deeply seated in me as my own soul itself. But you know that at the root of everything is my own distrust in myself. Perhaps if I had never gone to Russia I should have had more confidence, but that country, as I see it now, stirs always through the hearts of its lovers, questions about everything in heaven or earth and then tells one at the end that nothing matters. And the Englishman that is in me has always fought that distrust, has called it sentimental, feeble, and then again I’ve caught back the superstition and the wonder. In Russia one’s so close to God and the Devil—in England there is business and common-sense. Between the two I’m pretty useless. If you had once seen Katherine you’d know why she seems to me a refuge from all that I’ve been fighting with Anna for so long. She’s clear and true as steel—so quiet, so sure, so much better and finer than myself that I feel that I’m the most selfish hound in the world to dream of attaching her to me. Mind you, I don’t know at present that she’s interested; she’s so young and ignorant in so many ways, with all her calm common-sense, that I’m terrified of alarming her, and if she doesn’t care for me I’ll never disturb her—never. But if she should—well, then, I believe that I can make her happy—I know myself by now. I’ve left my Moscow self behind me just as Anna said that I must. There’s nothing stranger than the way that Anna foretold it all. That night when she shewed me that I must go she drew a picture of the kind of woman whom I must find. She had never been to England, she had only, in all her life, seen one or two Englishwomen, but she knew, she knew absolutely. It’s as though she had seen Katherine in her dreams....