for men; sometimes, again, I think there is an
abstract reason for it, and there is something more substantive about a
woman than ever there can be about a man. I can conceive a great
mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain-tops or in some
lost island in the pagan seas, and ask no more. Whereas if I hear of a
Hercules, I ask after Iole or Dejanira. I cannot think him a man without
women. But I can think of these three deep-breasted women, living out
all their days on remote hilltops, seeing the white dawn and the purple
even, and the world outspread before them for ever, and no more to them
for ever than a sight of the eyes, a hearing of the ears, a far-away
interest of the inflexible heart, not pausing, not pitying, but austere
with a holy austerity, rigid with a calm and passionless rigidity; and I
find them none the less women to the end.

And think, if one could love a woman like that once, see her once grow
pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not
be a small thing to die? Not that there is not a passion of a quite
other sort, much less epic, far more dramatic and intimate, that comes
out of the very frailty of perishable women; out of the lines of
suffering that we see written about their eyes, and that we may wipe out
if it were but for a moment; out of the thin hands, wrought and tempered
in agony to a fineness of perception, that the indifferent or the merely
happy cannot know; out of the tragedy that lies about such a love, and
the pathetic incompleteness. This is another thing, and perhaps it is a
higher. I look over my shoulder at the three great headless Madonnas,
and they look back at me and do not move; see me, and through and over
me, the foul life of the city dying to its embers already as the night
draws on; and over miles and miles of silent country, set here and there
with lit towns, thundered through here and there with night expresses
scattering fire and smoke; and away to the ends of the earth, and the
furthest star, and the blank regions of nothing; and they are not moved.
My quiet, great-kneed, deep-breasted, well-draped ladies of Necessity, I
give my heart to you!

R. L. S.

TO MRS. SITWELL

_[Edinburgh] December 23, 1874._

_Monday._--I have come from a concert, and the concert was rather a
disappointment. Not so my afternoon skating--Duddingston, our big loch,
is bearing; and I wish you could have seen it this afternoon, co