Oct. 19, 1898.
My dear Sharp,
I had no idea that you were in England, and had no means of finding your address.
You read only a portion of Aylwin—as far, I think, as the discovery that Winifred had been the model of Wilderspin. I always intended to send you other portions, but procrastination ruined my good intentions. You and my dear friend Mrs. Sharp were very kind to it, I remember, and this encourages me to hope that when you come to read it in its entirety, you will like it better than ever. Although it is of course primarily a love-story, and, as such, will be read by the majority of readers, it is intended to be the pronouncement of something like a new gospel—the gospel of love as the great power which stands up and confronts a materialistic cosmogony and challenges it and conquers it. This gospel of course is more fully expressed in “The Coming of Love” of which I send you a copy. “The Coming of Love” is of course a sequel to Aylwin, although, for certain reasons, it preceded in publication the novel. Aylwin appears in the last year of the present century, and I had a certain object in delaying it for a little while longer because I believe that should it have more than an ephemeral existence as to which I am of course very doubtful, it will appeal fifty years hence to fifty people where it now only appeals to one. I cannot think that, when a man has felt the love-passion as deeply as Aylwin feels it, he will find it possible, whatever physical science may prove, to accept a materialistic theory of the universe. He must either commit suicide or become a maniac.... Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin, the Tarno Rye of “The Coming of Love,” spring from the same Romany ancestors and they inherited therefore the most passionate blood in the Western World. Each of them is driven to a peculiar spiritualistic cosmogony by the love of a girl—Winifred Wynne and Rhona Boswell, though the two girls are the exact opposite of each other in temperament.
But you really must let me get a glimpse of you somehow before you leave England again.
Your affectionate
“Aylwin.”