s everything else._" Because this is
so, love is the God of my faith.

You see where our subject takes us! And all the while I care nothing for
the points of argument except where they prick you from your position.
One must scale the skies and swim the seas in order to reach you. Well,
have I approached within your hearing?

I was sitting amongst the fennel in Barbara's garden when your letter
was brought, and I read it twice to make sure I understood. When the
sun lies warm on waving fennel and a city is before you, mysterious in a
veil of mist, it is easier to feel love than to think about it. For a
while, it was difficult to see the bearing of the data which you
marshalled so well in defence of your denial. You went far in order to
answer why you are content to marry a woman you do not love. Your
methods are not the methods of the practical mind. I am glad for that.
You idealise your attitude, you go far back in time, you enmesh yourself
in theories and generalisations, you ride your imagination proudly, in
order to reconcile yourself to something which suggests itself as more
ideal than that for which the unreasoning heart hungers. You are sad,
but you are not practical and you are not blase.

Of Barbara, of myself, and of London doings, this is no time to write.
Tell Hester your friend thinks of her.

Yours with great memories and greater hopes,
DANE KEMPTON.

XX

FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON

THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
May 18, 19--.

I stand aloof and laugh at myself and you. Oh, believe me, I see it very
clearly myself in the heyday and cocksureness of youth, flinging at you,
with much energy and little skill, my immature generalisations from
science; and you with an elderly beneficence and tolerance, smiling
shrewdly and affectionately upon me, secure in the knowledge that sooner
or later I am sure to get through with it all and join you in your broad
and placid philosophy. It is the penalty age exacts from youth. Well, I
accept it.

So I am suffering from the sadness of science. I had been prone to
ascribe my feelings to the passion of science. But it does not matter in
the least--only, somehow, I would rather you did not misunderstand me
so dreadfully. I do not raise the wail of Ecclesiastes. I am not sad,
but glad. I discover romance has a history, and in history I am quicker
to read the romance. I accept the thesis of a common origin, not to
regret it, but to make the best of