In the last line of the sonnet it came out: "'There mid the poppies of the planisphere, I swooned for very joy and wearihead.' But I knew it by the poppies. Then, dear Miss Dulcimer, you should just see the things he calls me--'Love's gonfalon and lodestar' and what-not. Very often I can't even find them in the dictionary and it makes me uneasy. Heaven knows what he may be saying about me! When he talks of "'The rack of unevasive lunar things' I do not so much complain, because it's their concern if they are libelled. It is different with incomprehensible remarks flung unmistakably at my own head such as "'O chariest of Caryatides.' It sounds like a reproach and I should like to know what I have done to deserve it. And then his general remarks are so monotonously unintelligible. One of his longest poetical epistles, which is burnt into my memory because I had to pay twopence for extra postage, began with this lament: "'O sweet are roses in the summer time And Indian naiads' weary walruses And yet two-morrow never comes to-day.' I cannot see any way out of it all except by breaking off our engagement. When we were first engaged, I don't deny I rather liked being written about in lovely-sounding lines but it is a sweet one is soon surfeited with, and Silverplume has raved about me to that extent that he has made me look ridiculous in the eyes of all my friends. If he had been moderate, they would have been envious; now they laugh when they read of my wonderful charms, of my lithe snake's mouth, and my face which shames the sun and my Epipsychidiontic eyes (whatever that may be) and my "'Wee waist that holds the cosmos in its span,' and say he is poking fun at me. But Silverplume is quite serious--I am sure of that, and it is the worst feature of the case. He carries on just the same in conversation, with the most improper allusions to heathen goddesses, and seems really to believe that I am absorbed in the sunset when I am thinking what to wear to-morrow. Just to give you an idea of how he misinterprets my silence let me read to you one of his sonnets called: "'MOONSHINE. "'Walking a space betwixt the double Naught, The What Is Bound to Be and What Has Been, How sweet with Thee beneath the moonlit treen, O woman-soul immaculately wrought, To sit and catch a harmony uncaught Within a world that mocks with margarine, In chastened silence, mystic, epicene, Exchanging incommunicable thought. "'Diana, Death may doom and Time may toss, And sundry other kindred things occur, But Hell itself can never turn to loss, Though Mephistopheles his stumps should stir, That day, when introduced at Charing Cross, I smiled and doffed my silken cylinder.'