Dear Lady: If I disappointed you last evening, be sure that I myself was much more disappointed, especially as I had to pass within a stone's throw of your house without going in. I believe that if you only knew how frightfully busy we all are, you would have postponed the invitation until next week, when I shall have some leisure and hope to see you. I had expected up to the last moment to be able to call, if only for an hour; but a sudden appointment put it out of my power. The convention is keeping us all as busy as men can be.
I see you returned my letter. I know it was not a satisfactory one. Somehow the ghosts of the letters I write by night laugh in my face by day. I either talk too freely or write too hurriedly. I will not certainly give your books away, for I prize them highly and am delighted with them. I had thought they were only lent. They now nestle on my book-shelf along with a copy of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," illustrated by Doré, Gautier's most Pre-Raphael and wickedest work, Swinburne, Edgar Poe, Rabelais, Aldrich, and some other odd books which form my library. I generally read a little before going to bed.
I hope to visit your farm indeed, but the journalist is a creature who sells himself for a salary. He is a slave to his master, and must await the course of events.
No; you must not pity me or feel sorry for me. What would you do if I were to write you some of my up-and-down experiences and absurdities? And you cannot be of service to me except I were suddenly to lose everything and not know where to turn. Now I am doing very well, and would be doing better but for an escapade....
Of course I will write you in P—; I should like nothing better, feeling towards you like Prosper Mérimée to his "inconnue." I wish I could make my letters equally interesting.
I do not think that I am unfortunate in life, and yet I have done everything to make me so. If you only knew some of my follies, you would cease perhaps to like me. Some day I will confide some of my oddities to you. But don't think me unfortunate because I am a skeptic.
Skepticism is hereditary on my father's side. My mother, a Greek woman, was rather reverential; she believed in the Oriental Catholicism,—the Byzantine fashion of Christianity which produced such hideous madonnas and idiotic-looking saints in stained glass. I think being skeptical enables one to enjoy life better,—to live like the ancients without thought of the Shadow of Death. I was once a Catholic,—at least, my guardians tried to make me so, but only succeeded in making me dream of all priests as monsters and hypocrites, of nuns as goblins in black robes, of religion as epidemic insanity, useful only in inculcating ethics in coarse minds by main force. Afterwards it often delighted me to force a controversy upon some priest, deny his basis of belief, and find him startled to discover that he could not attempt to establish it logically.
You say, "What else is there" but faith to make life pleasant? Why, the majority of things that faith despises. I fancy if one will only try to analyze the amount of comfort derived from Christianity by himself, he will find the candid answer. Whence come all our arts, our loves, our luxuries, our best literature, our sense of manhood to do and dare, our reverence or respect: for Woman, our sense of beauty, our sense of humanity? Never from Christianity. From the antique faiths, the dead civilizations, the lost Greece and Rome, the warrior-creed of Scandinavia, the Viking's manhood and reverence for woman,—his creator and goddess. Yet all faiths surely have their ends in shaping and perfecting this electrical machine of the human mind, and preparing the field of humanity for a wider harvest of future generations, long after the worms, fed from our own lives, have ceased to writhe about us, as the serpents writhe among the grinning masks of stone on the columns of Persepolis.
How you must be bored by so long a letter!
[The letter is signed by a drawing of the raven, familiar in the letters to Mr. Watkin.]