, ever
smiled and kissed his hand to Brahma. Dear Philip, if you only knew how
jealous I am sometimes of your Indian reveries, you would understand how I
could consider Jack's treacherous little revelation almost as an answer to
a prayer.

XLI

PHILIP TO JESSICA

Dear Jessica, you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now and
cast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of that
book of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with him
into his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us in
his determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come to
see the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book is
false or that I have discarded my opinion of the spiritual supremacy of
those old forest philosophers of India, but I have come to see how
unsuited their principles of life must be for our western world. They
beheld a great gap between the body and the spirit, and their remedy was,
not to construct a bridge between the two, but by some tremendous and
dizzy leap to pass over the yawning gulf. We, to whom the life of the body
is so real, we who have devoted the whole ingenuity of our mechanical
civilisation to the building up of a comfortable home for that body, turn
away from such spiritual legerdemain with distrust, almost with terror. A
man among us to-day who would take the religion of India as his guide is
in danger of losing this world without gaining the other. No, our
salvation, if it comes, must come from Greece rather than from India. Some
day I shall write my recantation and point out the way of salvation
according to the Gospel of Plato. Indeed, since love has become a reality
to me, I have learned to read a new meaning in this philosophy of
reconciliation instead of renunciation. Tell your father all this. Some
way we must bring this uncertainty to an end. I must know that you are to
be my wife.

And so Jack thinks a fuliginous pipe holds the first place in my
affections. The little rascal! And why don't you make that precocious imp
write to me? Do I not stand to him _in loco parentis_? But, joking aside,
he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of my
pipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment,
(for I never even read during this sacramental act,) there arises before
my eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed trees
down whose mur