“Your congratulations on my ‘success,’ as you are pleased to call it, are very sweet. Public success seems to me to mean so little. After a good dinner the playgoeer enjoys any foolery—and much the same with books. A good temper makes a satisfied reader, and an easy chair and shady lamp do the rest. I am not satisfied. Far from it. Sheaves of reviews—and all good ones, strange to relate—lie before me; but they mean nothing. I know inside my little _me_ that I ought to have done better. “Perhaps I should have been wise never to have commenced the struggle. To have retired from London to a suburb or a cottage and lived quietly on my small income. You will say I have a fit of the blues—and doubtless I have—or liver, or something equally stupid; but I’ve been pretty hard at it for four years now—three books have been conceived and born and a fourth nearly done, and I am still alive; but I’m tired. Shall I go to Mexico and write another while I am young enough to rough it and stand the racket, or shall I throw down the pen and cry vanquished? Work is a tough job to a woman never brought up to the idea of working, and perhaps I’m trying to carry more on my silly shoulders than those silly sloping shoulders can bear. The table is covered with orders of all sorts and kinds—work lies before me if only I had the pluck to do it. The more ’success’ I gather, as you call it, the more incapable I feel. “Two strings are tugging at me, one says _go on_, the other says _stop_. The first may end in failure. The second begins in failure. Mexico—and quite alone—mind you, is a long way, and a big job. To-night I seem to funk it; but, then, to-night I seem to funk everything, and even your letter of love and sympathy, dear friend, has not quite dragged me back to my senses. I’m very lonely at times, and that’s the truth. After that remark you will think I’m going to marry again; but there you are wrong. You lost your hundred pounds bet that I would re-marry in a year—so don’t be foolish and risk any more on this silly, wayward, lonely, spoilt pen-woman. “Yours, etc.” N.B.—I went to Mexico shortly after—alone, quite alone, on a twenty-five-thousand-mile journey. Why did I choose Mexico to visit and write about? Because with all the world before me that land seemed to offer a more historic past than almost any other country on God’s earth; and was there not a spice of danger and romance lurking amongst its hills and valleys? I left London in July, and, after halting in Canada and the United States, landed in Mexico on November 1st, 1900, and returned to England in April, 1901. Between those dates I had travelled some twenty-five thousand miles, had spent thirty-nine nights in moving trains, and many more in private Pullman-cars in railway sidings. I had lived a life of luxury and ease and had roughed it to nigh unendurable straits. Besides which I was constantly sending home articles to the English Press.