I could
love, but you have discovered depths in my own nature I had scarcely
suspected. Except for a few early ebullitions of passion, natural to
a warm and romantic disposition, and leaving no harmful
after-effects--ebullitions that by the standards of the higher truth I
feel no one can justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no
means ashamed--I come to you a pure and unencumbered man. I love you.
In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property and
further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you a life
of wide and generous refinement, travel, books, discussion, and easy
relations with a circle of clever and brilliant and thoughtful people
with whom my literary work has brought me into contact, and of which,
seeing me only as you have done alone in Morningside Park, you can have
no idea. I have a certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic,
and I belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of
the day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of affairs,
artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally, mingle together
in the easiest and most delightful intercourse. That is my real milieu,
and one that I am convinced you would not only adorn but delight in.

"I find it very hard to write this letter. There are so many things
I want to tell you, and they stand on such different levels, that
the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant, and I find myself
doubting if I am really giving you the thread of emotion that should run
through all this letter. For although I must confess it reads very much
like an application or a testimonial or some such thing as that, I can
assure you I am writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart.
My mind is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and
accumulating--dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching quietly
together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music and all that
side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and shining in some
brilliant throng--mine; of your looking at flowers in some old-world
garden, our garden--there are splendid places to be got down in Surrey,
and a little runabout motor is quite within my means. You know they say,
as, indeed, I have just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written
in a state of emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad
offers of marriage. I have often felt before that it is only when one
has nothing