proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
The first part of the month with us is generally bustling and busy, a great clatter and hustling while the shrieking winter is got away out of sight over the hills, a sweeping of the world clear for the marsh-marigolds and daffodils, a diligent making of room for the divine calms of May. I always loved this first wild frolic of cold winds and catkins and hurriedly crimsoning pollards, of bleakness and promise, of roughness and sweetness—a blow on one cheek and a kiss on the other—before the spring has learned good manners, before it has left off being anything but a boisterous, naughty, charming Backfisch; but this year after having been ill so long it is more than love, it is passion. Only people who have been buried in beds for weeks getting used to listening for Death's step on the stairs, know what it is to go out into the stinging freshness of the young year and meet the first scilla, and hear a chaffinch calling out, and feel the sun burn red patches of life on their silly, sick white faces.
My parents send you kind remembrances. They were extremely interested to hear, through Professor Martens, of your engagement to Miss Cheriton. They both think it a most excellent thing.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXVII
Jena, April 20th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You tell me I do not answer your letters, but really I think I do quite often enough. I want to make the most of these weeks of idle getting strong again, and it is a sad waste of time writing. My step-mother has had such a dose of me sick and incapable, of doctor's bills and physic and beef-tea and night-lights, that she is prolonging the convalescent period quite beyond its just limits and will have me do nothing lest I should do too much. So I spend strange, glorious days, days strange and glorious to me, with nothing to do for anybody but myself and a clear conscience to do it with. The single sanction of my step-mother's approval has been enough to clear my conscience, from which you will see how illogically consciences can be cleared; for have I not always been sure she has no idea whatever of what is really good? Yet just her approval, a thing I know to be faulty and for ever in the wrong place, is sufficient to prop up my conscience and make it feel secure. How then, while I am busy reading Jane Austen and Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth—books foreordained from all time for the delight of persons getting well—shall I find time to write to you? And you must forgive me for a certain surprise that you should have time to write so much to me. What have I done to deserve these long letters? How many Foreign Office envelopes do you leave ungummed to write them? Es ist zu viel Ehre. It is very good of you. No, I will not make phrases like that, for I know you do not do it for any reason whatever but because you happen to want to.
You are going through one of those tiresome soul-sicknesses that periodically overtake the too comfortable, and you must, apparently, tell somebody about it. Well, it is a form of Weltschmerz, and only afflicts the well-fed. Pray do not suppose that I am insinuating that food is of undue interest to you; but it is true that if you did not have several meals a day and all of them too nice, if there were doubts about their regular recurrence, if, briefly, you were a washerwoman or a plough-boy, you would not have things the matter with your soul. Washerwomen and ploughboys do not have sick souls. Probably you will say they have no souls to be sick; but they have, you know. I imagine their souls thin and threadbare, stunted by cold and hunger, poor and pitiful, but certainly there. And I don't know that it is not a nicer sort of soul to have inside one's plodding body than an unwieldy, overgrown thing, chiefly water and air and lightly changeable stuff, so unsubstantial that it flops—forgive the word, but it does flop—on to other souls in search of sympathy and support and comfort and all the rest of the things washer-women waste no time looking for, because they know they wouldn't find them.