has even had his pass-book from the bank and has compared it with his counterfoils. I haven’t, on account of this improvement, yet been round to his chemist’s. But I shall certainly tell them that they _must_ surreptitiously decrease the strength of it.) That was the longest time we have ever really talked together. And, when I think that in all these years I haven’t once so much as held your hand for a moment longer than the strictest of etiquette demanded! And I loved you within the first month. I wonder why that is. Fancy, perhaps. Habit perhaps--a kind of idealism, a kind of delicacy, a fastidiousness. As you know very well it is not on account of any moral scruples.... I break off to look through what I have already written to you. There is, first, the question of why I never told you my secret: then, the question of what my secret really is; I have started so many questions and have not followed one of them out to the very end. But all questions resolve themselves into the one question of our dear and inestimable relationship. I think it has been one of the great charms of our relationship that all our talks have been just talks. We have discussed everything under the sun, but we have never discussed anything _au fond_. We have strayed into all sorts of byways and have never got anywhere. I try to remember how many evenings in the last five years we have not spent together. I think they must be less than a hundred in number. You know how, occasionally, your husband would wake out of his stupors--or walk _in_ his stupor and deliver one of his astonishingly brilliant disquisitions. But remember how, always, whether he talked of free love or the improvement in the breed of carriage-horses, he always thrashed his subject out to the bitter end. It was not living with a man: it was assisting at a performance. And, when he was sunk into his drugs or when he was merely literary, or when he was away, how lazily we talked. I think no two minds were ever so fitted one into another as yours and mine. It is not of course that we agree on all subjects--or perhaps upon any. In the whole matter of conduct we are so absolutely different--you are always for circumspection, for a careful preparation of the ground, for patience; and I am always ready to act, and afterwards draw the moral from my own actions. But somehow, in the end, it has all worked out in our being in perfect agreement. Later I will tell you why that is. * * * * *