The real head of the Oliphant family is an outrageous old hag, Dan’s grandmother, who behaved terribly to me at my only meeting with her—it will remain our only meeting! They’re all afraid of her, and she has a lot of money. Queer—I understand he’s tried to raise money for his Eden all over the town, but never asked the terrible grandmother. She doesn’t believe in it, and I must say she’s right about _that_! Rather! How strange that any girl should do what I’ve done—and with my eyes wide open! I did it, and yet I knew he didn’t understand me. I ought to have known that he can _never_ understand me, that we don’t speak the same language and never will. I ought to have realized what it means to know that I must live days, weeks, months, _years_ with a person who will never understand anything whatever of my real self! Yet I still care for him, and he is good. He does a thousand little kind things for me that do not help me at all, and the truth is most of them only irritate me. How odd it is that I write to you about not being understood—you who are seldom kind to me and often most unjust! Yet in a way I have always felt that you do understand me a little—perhaps unsympathetically—but at least you give me the luxury of being _partly_ understood. Yes, I still care for him, but when I think of his awful Ornaby thing I sometimes believe I have married a madman. It is nothing _as I said_—hopeless—a devastated farm—and yet when he speaks of it his eye lights up and he begins to walk about and gesture and talk as if he actually saw houses and streets—and shops—and thousands of people living there! If this isn’t hallucination, I don’t know what hallucination means. But since our excursion to the place I’ve almost cured him of talking about it to _me_! I just can’t _stand_ it! And what is pleasant, I think he probably goes to talk about it to another woman. Already! A perfectly enormous girl seven or eight feet tall that he’d picked out to be my most intimate friend! Because she’s been _his_ most intimate friend, of course. But I suppose all men are like _that_. The heat did relax for a day or two—but it’s back again. Sometimes I can’t believe I am actually in this place—apparently for life—and I begin to hope that I’ll wake up. I think even you would pity me sometimes, George. CHAPTER XII