But, my dear mamma, enough of this, for you will think my marriage a failure, and contribute my experiences to the building up of Mona Caird’s theories. By the way, how shocked I felt at reading them, although I now divine some meanings that I had overlooked! But never can I tolerate the thought that there are not people—ideal, if you please—whose marriages might be too sublimated for earthly contract, and are, therefore—according to the proverb—made in heaven. Dear mother, pardon me, there is something wanting in your letters. You promised me to mention everybody we ever knew, or something to that effect. I am absolutely famishing for news of our old friends. By the way, how peculiar it is, I seem to remember with singular pertinacity the people we knew before we came to Boston, and dear, beautiful Denver is ever before my eyes. Please remember everything, and above all your affectionate ELLEN. _From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Miss Fanny Fielding, Denver, Colorado._ BERLIN, May 1, 1893. MY DEAR OLD SCHOOLMATE: Your kind letter makes me homesick. Can you imagine a homesick bride? Even before fruitage appears from the orange bloom, dismated for the decking of my nuptial robes, or even the fragrance departed from the yellowing buds on the garniture laid away to rest and rust, I am sitting with an unwilling face to the open door of the future, and groping with a blind but eager hand among the rustling leaves of a near past, for some familiar touch or sound to summon back the half-tasted joys which I so ruthlessly flung away. You ask me for some advice concerning marriage, illumined, as you tersely put it, by experience. My sweet friend, what a useless task you impose upon me. Whenever was woman directed by the experiences of others, however wise or however bitter such experiences may have been? Always some suggestion or exception to change the verdict. “Mine has black eyes, yours has blue, which makes all the difference.” Or, “one is fat, the other lean.” Or, “this one walks, the other rides”—so infinite the variety of excuses, so single the faith of woman. What else, then, shall we call marriage but destiny? The heart knows its wants and we know its plaintive cry, as a mother knows the wail of her famishing babe; yet for some frivolous fancy or conceit, some wound to our vanity, some plethoric ambition, or some glittering paste or bauble, we stifle the natural cry of the human heart, and wait for the mystic note upon which is to be constructed the music of our future. Alas! in the metaphor you understand so well, we too often touch only the diminished seventh, and the sure, complete, resolving chord is never sounded.