"Why do I want to join you?" asked the miracle. "Because I am disgusted with my lover--because I am a _femme incomprise_. Oh, don't stare at me as if I were a medley of megrims and fashionable ailments, I'm the very opposite of that. Mine is a buoyant, breezy, healthy nature, straightforward and simple. That's why I complain of being misunderstood. My lover is a poet--and the misunderstanding I have to endure at his hands is something appalling. Every man is a bit of a poet where woman is concerned, and so every woman is more or less misunderstood, but when you are unfortunate enough to excite the affection of a real whole poet--well, that way madness lies. Your words are twisted into meanings you never intended, your motives are misconstrued, and your simplest actions are distorted. Silverplume, for it is the well-known author of 'Poems of Compassion' that I have had the misfortune to captivate, never calls without laying a sonnet next day; in which remarks, that must be most misleading to those who do not know me, occur with painful frequency. His allowance is two kisses per day--one of salutation, one of farewell. We have only been actually engaged two months, yet I have counted up two hundred and thirty-nine distinct and separate kisses in the voluminous 'Sonnet Series' which he has devoted to our engagement, and, what is worse, he describes himself as depositing them. "'Where at thy flower-mouth exiguous The purple passion mantles to the brim.' It sounds as if I was berouged like a dowager. Purple passion, indeed! I let him kiss me because he appears to like it and because there seems something wrong about it--but as for really caring a pin one way or another, well, you Miss Dulcimer, know how much there is in that! This 'Sonnet Series' promises to be endless, the course of our acquaintanceship is depicted in its most minute phases with the most elaborate inaccuracy--if I smile, if I say: 'How do you do?' if I put my hand to my forehead, if I look into the fire, down go fourteen lines giving a whole world of significance to my meanest actions, and making Himalayas out of the most microscopic molehills. I am credited with thoughts I never dreamed of and sentiments I never felt, till I ask myself whether any other woman was ever so cruelly misunderstood as I? I grow afraid to do or say anything, lest I bring upon my head a new sonnet. But even so I cannot help _looking_ something or the other; and when I come to read the sonnet I find it is always the other. Once I refused to see him for a whole week, but that only resulted in seven 'Sonnets of Absence,' imaginatively depicting what I was saying and doing each day, and containing a detailed analysis of his own sensations, as well as reminiscences of past happy hours together. Most of them I had no recollection of, and the only one I could at all share was that of a morning we spent on the Ramsgate cliffs where Silverplume put his handkerchief over his face and fell asleep.