ep. The strong light, the pricking air, had kept her
wakeful; and she had been employing her time in writing to her mother,
who was also her friend.

"... Dear little mother--You will say I have been unkind--I say it to
myself. But would it really have been fairer if I had forbidden him to
join us? There was just a chance--it seems ridiculous now--but there
was--I confess it! And by my letter from Toronto--though really my
little note might have been written to anybody--I as good as said so to
him, 'Come and throw the dice and--let us see what falls out!'
Practically, that is what it amounted to--I admit it in sackcloth and
ashes. Well!--we have thrown the dice--and it won't do! No, it won't, it
won't do! And it is somehow all my fault--which is abominable. But I see
now, what I never saw at home or in Italy, that he is a thousand years
older than I--that I should weary and jar upon him at every turn, were I
to marry him. Also I have discovered--out here--I believe, darling, you
have known it all along!--that there is at the very root of me a kind of
savage--a creature that hates fish-knives and finger-glasses and
dressing for dinner--the things I have done all my life, and Arthur
Delaine will go on doing all his. Also that I never want to see a museum
again--at least, not for a long time; and that I don't care twopence
whether Herculaneum is excavated or not!

"Isn't it shocking? I can't explain myself; and poor Mr. Arthur
evidently can't make head or tail of me, and thinks me a little mad. So
I am, in a sense. I am suffering from a new kind of _folie des
grandeurs_. The world has suddenly grown so big; everything in the human
story--all its simple fundamental things at least--is writ so large
here. Hope and ambition--love and courage--the man wrestling with the
earth--the woman who bears and brings up children--it is as though I had
never felt, never seen them before. They rise out of the dust and mist
of our modern life--great shapes warm from the breast of Nature--and I
hold my breath. Behind them, for landscape, all the dumb age-long past
of these plains and mountains; and in front, the future on the loom, and
the young radiant nation, shuttle in hand, moving to and fro at her
unfolding task!

"How unfair to Mr. Arthur that this queer intoxication of mine should
have altered him so in my foolish eyes--as though one had scrubbed all
the golden varnish from an old picture, and left it crude and
charmless. It is no