tively a student. I
wasn't--I never shall be--absolutely satisfied with my general ideas. I
was enquiring keenly and closely into those problems of group and crowd
psychology from which all this big publishing work has arisen, and
giving particular attention to the war-panics and outbreaks of
international hostility that were then passing in deepening waves
across Europe. I had already accumulated a mass of notes for the book
upon "Group Jealousy in Religious Persecution, Racial Conflicts and War"
which I hope to publish the year after next, and which therefore I hope
you will have read long before this present book can possibly come to
you. And moreover Rachel and I had established our home in London--in
the house we now occupy during the winter and spring--and both you and
your little sister had begun your careers as inhabitants of this earth.
Your little sister had indeed but just begun.

And then one morning at the breakfast-table I picked a square envelope
out of a heap of letters, and saw the half-forgotten and infinitely
familiar handwriting of Lady Mary Justin.... The sight of it gave me an
odd mixture of sensations. I was startled, I was disturbed, I was a
little afraid. I hadn't forgiven her yet; it needed but this touch to
tell me how little I had forgotten....

Sec. 2

I sat with it in my hand for a moment or so before I opened it,
hesitating as one hesitates before a door that may reveal a dramatic
situation. Then I pushed my chair a little back from the table and
ripped the envelope.

It was a far longer letter than Mary had ever written me in the old
days, and in a handwriting as fine as ever but now rather smaller. I
have it still, and here I open its worn folds and, except for a few
trifling omissions, copy it out for you.... A few trifling omissions, I
say,--just one there is that is not trifling, but that I must needs
make....

You will never see any of these letters because I shall destroy them so
soon as this copy is made. It has been difficult--or I should have
destroyed them before. But some things can be too hard for us....

This first letter is on the Martens note-paper; its very heading was
familiar to me. The handwriting of the earlier sentences is a little
stiff and disjointed, and there are one or two scribbled obliterations;
it is like someone embarrassed in speaking; and then it passes into her
usual and characteristic ease....

And as I read, slowly my long-cherished anger evap