"Yet only I, because in life I bear The vision of that peace, may never feel The spur of keen ambition, never share The dread of loss that makes the world's work real. "Therefore in scorn I draw my bitter breath, And sorrow cherish as my proudest right, Till scorn and sorrow fade in sweeter death." The Angel answered, turning as for flight: "The labour sorrow-done is more than sterile, And scorn will change thy vision to soul's peril: Be glad; thy work is gladness, child of light!" IX JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: Many thanks for this copy of your book, _The Forest Philosophers of India_. I have just finished reading it, and now I understand you better. Your sense of reality has been destroyed by this mysticism of the East. The normal man has a more materialistic consciousness. But having lost that, your very spirit has dissolved into these strange illuminations which you call thought, but which I fear are only the ghostly rays of a Nirvana intelligence. With you life is but a breath without form, a whisper out of your long eternity. And I confess that to me the impression of a man not being at home in his own body is nothing short of terrifying. You were not expecting so fierce a criticism of your own book from one of your own reviewers, I suspect. Ah, but your "Three Commands" have laid me under a spell. I cannot say anything about them without saying too much; and I am a little rebellious. X JESSICA TO PHILIP MY DEAR MR. TOWERS: I have not replied earlier to your letter on the problem of consciousness, because I was waiting to read Dr. Minot's article. At last I got hold of the magazine, and so far from finding your comments "a tangle of crude ideas," they have even proved suggestive--perhaps not in the way you expected. For following your line of thought, I wondered if it could have been some violent death-rate among our own species that has produced that desperate phenomenon, the literary consciousness of the historical novelist I have been reviewing for you. And, come to think of it, I do not know any other class of people whose problem of consciousness could be so readily reduced to a "bionomical" platitude. They all write for the same slaying purpose. Did you ever observe how few of their characters survive the ordeals of art? Usually it is the long-lost heroine, and the hero, "wounded unto death" however, and one has the impression that even these would not have lived so long but for the necessity of the final page.