This was to the critic; to the wife he wrote:
"Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel true and blade straight
The great Artificer made my mate.
Honor, anger, valor, fire,
A love that life could never tire,
Death quench, or evil stir,
The mighty Master gave to her.
Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart whole and soul free,
The August Father gave to me."
As the years passed, their comradeship grew closer, and, indeed, their relationship can perhaps be expressed in no better way than to call them "comrades," with all that the word implies. In writing to her he usually called her "My dear fellow," and in speaking often addressed her in the same way. His attachment and admiration for her steadily increased in proportion to his longer acquaintance with her. Once at Vailima they were all playing a game called "Truth," in which each person writes a list of the qualities—courage, humour, beauty, etc.—supposed to be possessed by the others, with the corresponding ratio in numbers, ten being the maximum. Louis put his wife down as ten for beauty. She argued with him that he must be perfectly honest and not complimentary; he looked at her in amazement and said: "I am honest; I think you are the most beautiful woman in the world."
Once when her birthday, the 10th of March, came around, she found on waking these verses pinned to the netting of her bed:
"To the Stormy Petrel
"Ever perilous
And precious, like an ember from the fire
Or gem from a volcano, we to-day
When drums of war reverberate in the land
And every face is for the battle blacked—
No less the sky, that over sodden woods
Menaces now in the disconsolate calm
The hurly-burly of the hurricane—
Do now most fitly celebrate your day.
Yet amid turmoil, keep for me, my dear,
The kind domestic fagot. Let the hearth
Shine ever as (I praise my honest gods)
In peace and tempest it has ever shone."
She said these verses were the best of all her birthday presents. He called her the "stormy petrel" in reference to her birth in the wild month of March, and because she was such a fiery little person. When she took sides in an argument he would say, in mild irony: "The shouts of the women in the opposite camp were heard demanding the heads of the prisoners."
All through the daily entries in her diary, mingled with the incidents of the household, runs the talk of impending war: