I blush for many hours since. Sometimes I have felt as if I were on a vast plain and there was no God nor earth nor the quality of love anywhere, but only I--deathless--in long, hideous travail, all life to be tested against this Me!... * * * * * How I want to write! Every day more awe enfolds the dream. Days bring me closer to the Town. The war has deepened the hearts of all the young people here, especially the women. Young women are very wonderful to me. They have a certain loveliness of body that comes of girl-whiteness within--thoughtful tenderness about them, and something else, a lightness that may be just youth. It attracts me because I have never felt it. I do not care if the gods laugh at my ambitions to write. By the very sign that we are victims of matter now, we shall become victors. I want the bottom--down among the deeps of pain, where all the sorrow of the world is my sorrow; all tears, my tears.... I am not ready for the Hive. No compromise. To accept less in one's work than the dream--that is failure. * * * * * The Valley Road Girl is eighteen. She has hardly been away from the little town by the lake shore. She is held to it queerly still. I expect her to make the place long-lived in the memory of many novel readers. I see the big book of the country-side about her--a gallery of quaint and curious faces--done with her stern, sweet power. I have seen this big book building about her, as I see the top trays of The Abbot's Sea Chest. These are the days of her sketching and tearing down. Deep draughts of life call to her, deeps of religion, deeps of cosmic memory--and all about is the little town. The meaning has come to her at last. Already she has turned to love the nearest; loving the nearest will unfold the big book and set her free. Six hundred pages I call for--the leisurely vibration, terrible intensity of romantic moments, passion of the fields, the hideous mockery of narrow, brittle lives, the country-wife worn glassy with routine and insane monotony, and the young of the country-side--quick bloom, pure youth falling into coarseness before its form is finished, the real and immortal behind it all. These are her properties. Hundreds of pages have been written and prayerfully destroyed. Thus is she setting herself free. I have a paper of hers on the spiritual adventures of a smileless child--which I liked much when it came in, more than two years ago. The Valley Road Girl is close to us in all our preparing and building; so that these chapters would be strange without her voice: