ith my joyful science.

Poesy and economics! Alack! alack! How did I escape you, Dane, when mind
and mood you mastered me? The auguries were fair. I, too, should have
been a singer, and lo, I strive for science. All my boyhood was singing,
what of you; and my father was a singer, too, in his own fine way. Dear
to me is your likening of him to Waring.--"What's become of Waring?" He
_was_ Waring. I can think of him only as one who went away, "chose land
travel or seafaring."

Gwynne says I am sometimes almost a poet--Gwynne, you know, Arthur
Gwynne, who has come to live with me at The Ridge. "If it were not for
your dismal science," he is sure to add; and to fire him I lay it to the
defects of early training. I know he thinks that I never half
appreciated you, and that I do not appreciate you now. If you will
recollect, you praised his verses once. He cherishes that praise amongst
his sweetest treasures. Poor dear good old Gwynne, tender, sensitive,
shrinking, with the face of a seraph and the heart of a maid. Never were
two men more incongruously companioned. I love him for himself. He
tolerates me, I do secretly believe, because of you. He longs to meet
you,--he knew you well through my father,--and we often talk you over.
Be sure at every opportunity I tear off your halo and trundle it about.
Trust me, you receive scant courtesy.

How I wander on. My pen is unruly after the long vacation; my thought
yet wayward, what of the fever of successful wooing. And besides, ...
how shall I say?... such was the gracious warmth of your letter, of both
your letters, that I am at a loss. I feel weak, inadequate. It almost
seems as though you had made a demand upon something that is not in me.
Ah, you poets! It would seem your delight in my marriage were greater
than mine. In my present mood, it is you who are young, you who love; I
who have lived and am old.

Yes, I am going to be married. At this present moment, I doubt not, a
million men and women are saying the same thing. Hewers of wood and
drawers of water, princes and potentates, shy-shrinking maidens and
brazen-faced hussies, all saying, "I am going to be married." And all
looking forward to it as a crisis in their lives? No. After all,
marriage is the way of the world. Considered biologically, it is an
institution necessary for the perpetuation of the species. Why should it
be a crisis? These million men and women will marry, and the work of
the world go on just as it di