ry long." But this is
a good deal more than an emotional interest, and I don't think it will
fizzle out so quickly. For one thing, THIS man is quite different from
all the other men I've ever been interested in. The first moment I saw
him, I had the queerest sort of ARRESTED sensation. He's told me since,
that he felt exactly the same about me. Kind of lived before--"WHEN I
WAS A KING IN BABYLON AND YOU WERE A CHRISTIAN SLAVE" idea. Though I'm
quite certain that if I ever was a slave it must have been a Pagan and
not a Christian one. Joan, the experience was thrilling, positively
electrifying--Glamour--personal magnetism.... You couldn't possibly
understand unless you knew HIM. Descriptions are so hopeless. I'll
leave him to your imagination.

By the way, Molly annoyed me horribly the other day. "You know, dear,"
she had the audacity to remark, "he's not of OUR class, and if you
married him, you'd have to give up US! For could you suppose," she went
on to say, "that Chris and Mama--to say nothing of Aunt Eliza--would
tolerate an adventurer who tells tall stories about buried treasure and
native rebellions and expects one to be amused!"

OUR CLASS! Oh, how I detest the label! And that unspeakably dreadful
idea of social sheep and goats--and the unfathomable abyss between
Suburbia and Belgravia! Though I frankly own that to me Suburbia
represents the Absolutely Impossible. After all, one must go right into
the Wilderness to escape the conditions of that state of life to which
you happen to have been born.

Well, that speech of Molly's came out of a fascinating account my
Soldier of Fortune gave us of how he stage-managed a revolution in
South America, and of an expedition he'd made in the Andes on the
strength of a local tradition about the Incas' hidden gold. I call him
my Soldier of Fortune--though he's not in any known Army list, because
it's what he called himself. Likewise a Champion of the Dispossessed.
He has an intense sympathy with the indigenous populations, and thinks
the British system of conquering and corrupting native races simply a
disgrace to civilisation. With all of which sentiments I entirely
agree. Luke has taken to him immensely, chiefly, I fancy, because he
was once private secretary to some Administrating Rajah in an
Eastern-Archipelago or Indian Island, and as Luke is hankering after a
colonial governorship, he wants to scrape up all the information he can
about such posts.

I answered Molly