it in the far-off age when I thought I was in love with you.... It is terrible, but I am forgetting England. Terrible, because it must be wrong to forget one's country, seeing how you oppressed nationalities go on remembering your wretched countries for centuries of years, and throwing bombs and murdering policemen for all the world as though you weren't just as happy as every one else, while I, with a country, which is after all worth remembering, go and forget it after a paltry two years! Of course it will always be my country, and I shall always love it for the good things it has given me, but as a _fact_ in my life it has faded into something more dim than a memory. A spell has been put upon me, Dikran, to prevent a possible ache in my heart for the things I was born among, a spell which has made me forget Europe and all my friends in it except just you, and you because, in spite of all your English airs, you will always be a pathetic little stranger in a very strange land, fumbling for the key.... Ah, this wise old East of mine! so old and so wise, my dear, that it knows for certain that nothing is worth doing; and as you happen, perhaps, on the ruins of a long-dead city by the desert, you can almost hear it chuckling to itself in its hard-earned wisdom, as though to say that since God Himself is that very same Law which creates men, and cities, and religions only to level them into the dust of the roads and the sands of the desert, why fight against God! It is a corrupt and deadening creed, this of the East, but it has a weight of ancestral will behind it which forces you to believe in it; and belief in it leaves you without your Western defences, and open to be charmed into non-resistance, as I and my Blue Bird have been charmed, else perhaps I would not now be so happy, and might even be dining with you on the terrace of the Hyde Park Hotel.... Rather bitterly you have often called me the slave of Ishtar, though at the time I did not know who the lady was, for I was always rather weak about goddesses and such like; but I guessed she had something to do with love because of the context, for you were developing your pleasant theory about how I would come to a bad end, someday.... Well, Dikran, that 'someday' of your prophecy has come. I've never belonged so wholly to Ishtar as I do now that I am perhaps in the very same country in which she once haunted the imagination of the myriad East. I've made a mess of life, I've come to my bad end, and, as I tell you, I have never known such perfect happiness. The world couldn't wish me a worse fate, and I couldn't wish myself a better.... Don't write to me, please. I can always imagine you much more clearly than your letters can express you, and if I think of you as doing big things, as I pray you may, it will be better for me than knowing that you are doing nothing at all, which might easily happen, seeing how lazy you are.... In the dim ages I was all wrong about life.