It sounds as if I was berouged like a dowager. Purple passion, indeed! I let him kiss me because he appears to like it and because there seems something wrong about it—but as for really caring a pin one way or another, well, you Miss Dulcimer, know how much there is in that! This 'Sonnet Series' promises to be endless, the course of our acquaintanceship is depicted in its most minute phases with the most elaborate inaccuracy—if I smile, if I say: 'How do you do?' if I put my hand to my forehead, if I look into the fire, down go fourteen lines giving a whole world of significance to my meanest actions, and making Himalayas out of the most microscopic molehills. I am credited with thoughts I never dreamed of and sentiments I never felt, till I ask myself whether any other woman was ever so cruelly misunderstood as I? I grow afraid to do or say anything, lest I bring upon my head a new sonnet. But even so I cannot help looking something or the other; and when I come to read the sonnet I find it is always the other. Once I refused to see him for a whole week, but that only resulted in seven 'Sonnets of Absence,' imaginatively depicting what I was saying and doing each day, and containing a detailed analysis of his own sensations, as well as reminiscences of past happy hours together. Most of them I had no recollection of, and the only one I could at all share was that of a morning we spent on the Ramsgate cliffs where Silverplume put his handkerchief over his face and fell asleep. 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,'