d my anxiety for
your spiritual welfare into my last letter. You found a way out of
difficulties--difficulties into which I plunged you. But we will say no
more on that point: enough has been said. You have created a life for
yourself. You have shown yourself to be a strong woman in more ways than
one, and are entitled to judge whether your work and the ideas you live
among are likely to prove prejudicial to your faith and morals. By a
virtue of forgiveness which I admire and thank you for, you write
telling me of the literary work you are engaged upon. If I had thought
before writing the letter I am now apologizing for, I could not have
failed to see that you write to me because you would relieve my
loneliness as far as you are able. But I did not think: I yielded to my
mood, and see now that my letters are disgracefully egotistical, and
very often absurd; for have I not begged of you to remember that since
God will hold me responsible for your soul, it would be well that you
should live a life of virtue and renunciation, so that I shall be saved
the humiliation of looking down from above upon you in hell?

'Loneliness begets sleeplessness, and sleeplessness begets a sort of
madness. I suffer from nightmare, and I cannot find words to tell you
how terrible are the visions one sees at dawn. It is not so much that
one sees unpleasant and ugly things--life is not always pretty or
agreeable, that we know--but when one lies between sleeping and waking,
life itself is shown in mean aspects, and it is whispered that one has
been duped till now; that now, and for the first time, one knows the
truth. You remember how the wind wails about the hilltop on which I
live. The wailing of wind has something to do with my condition of mind;
one cannot sit from eight o'clock in the evening till twelve at night
staring at the lamp, hearing the wind, and remain perfectly sane.

'But why am I writing about myself? I want to escape from myself, and
your letters enable me to do so. The names of the cities you are going
to visit transport me in imagination, and last night I sat a long while
wondering why I could not summon courage to go abroad. Something holds
me back. I think if I once left Garranard, I should never return to the
lake and its island. I hope you haven't forgotten Marban, the hermit who
lived at the end of the lake in Church Island. I visited his island
yesterday. I should have liked to have rowed myself through the strait
and