ROSA AMOROSA 
 
SOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 lii^nrg W, Sage 
 
 1S9X 
 
 ■A..^.u.oa.iJ :^\.gur-U4.... 
 
621- QPZ ei-0 17261- e 
 
 UEIUOM e to SJ3U3|-3A0| dlj) 'ESOJOUIV BSOU 
 
 ZUS8a'6696 Ud 
 
 AiEjqn At!SJ3A|Un II3UJ00 
 
 Ut 
 
 ireoi 
 i(iejq!|i8}U| 
 
 s^H m 
 
 tin/T -I I 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013248129 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
By THE SAME A UTHOR 
 
 THE WHEEL OF GOD 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 Second Editiok. 
 
 " Here, at any rate, we have a 
 novel of real power, displaying ^ 
 breadth of treatment and sympathy 
 which marks it out from the pass- 
 ing fiction of the day. . . An 
 - original, powerful, pathetic study 
 of life."— Fa// Mall Gazette. 
 
 "A remarkably fine exposition 
 of true womanhood of to-day. , , , 
 We would heartily recommend this 
 brief record of a yearning woman 
 to wide perusal and even close study. 
 It is delightful as a piece of writing, 
 and as a study of the present day 
 it is dee^, suggestive, and earnest." 
 Aberdeen Tree Press. 
 
 London : GRANT RICHARDS 
 9 Henrietta Street, W.C. 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 THE LOVE-LETTERS 
 OF A WOMAN 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE EGERTONr J^* 
 
 LONDON 
 GRANT RICHARDS 
 
 1 90 1 
 
 c/} 
 
 ■J 
 

 ^11 rig/its reserved 
 
 Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &= Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 TO 
 
 ALL TRUE LOVERS AND ONE 
 
EXPLANATORY NOTE 
 
 // has been suggested to me that owing to the 
 appearance of another book of love-letters, I 
 should volunteer some explanation as to these 
 
 of mine. 
 
 Arrangements for their publication were 
 concluded early in last par, and most of the 
 letters were obviously written before the an- 
 nouncement even of any other book of love- 
 letters was made. Personally, I cannot see 
 any probability of comparison, as I have heard 
 from competent judges that the other book 
 
 belongs to the region of exquisite literature; 
 
 this pretends to be no more than the veracious 
 
 expression of the thoughts and love of one 
 ' little woman, of value only as truthfully 
 
 human. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 In giving these letters to the buyers of books 
 I am not violating any confidence, or failing in 
 p.ny trust to the little soul who wrote them. 
 Indeed, it is perhaps the recollection of a speech 
 of her own which first suggested the giving of 
 them, in all their tender intimacy, to a greater 
 number of readers. She was sitting on a low 
 stool staring into the fire with her " speering " 
 seer eyes ; we were discussing the good taste of 
 a newly edited volume of love-letters. "• Per- 
 sonally," she said gravely, " I should not mind 
 if I had a crystal disc in my forehead, so that 
 all I have ever thought might be seen through 
 it, a camera lucida for all men. Of course " — I 
 recall the whimsicality of her mouth with a pang 
 of regret — " I do not hold myself accountable 
 for unconscious cerebration, or any of the sub- 
 conscious vagaries of the trolls of my fancy who 
 wanton in there — I lay the whole responsibility 
 
 9 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 thefebf humbly at the door of the great first 
 cause." 
 
 She had been writing on a pad on her knees, 
 and I said : " You would not like those letters 
 you write to fall into other hands than his ? " 
 I can see again the ripple of tenderness, as the 
 dancing shadow of aspen leaves in a sunlit brook, 
 tremble over her face. " I don't know ! Yes, 
 given certain conditions, I don't think I should 
 mind. The only thing in the world of moment, 
 to me is something in myself, something beyond 
 and above all criticism. If anything I have 
 written in them to gladden, to inspirit one mor- 
 bidly inclined mind, to kindle an unquenchable 
 beacon light in the gloom of one soul which I 
 found in darkness, could give others a tithe of 
 the same faith in love's joy and power for good 
 and gladness, it would be a good thing. Besides, 
 you want love here. 
 
 " You are all so serious in England, so des- 
 perately in earnest ! You have missions for the 
 working of all kinds of spells for the ensnare- 
 ment of gladness. All your jam holds a con- 
 cealed powder, so that one looks with distrust 
 at the offer of any sweetness. Poor Lady 
 Joyance, she can never trip it debonnairly, for 
 
 lO 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 the dour face of the Puritan lurks at "every 
 merry-making, ready to drive the dancers to 
 the door with thwacks of a wooden stave and 
 whispers of propriety. You are always playing 
 Blindman's Buff in search of morality, and 
 sinning against decency in your stumbles to 
 catch her. If your moral conscience as a nation 
 were not always in the way of your intellectual 
 conscience, a true transcript of your manners 
 would oust the French novel from the shelves 
 of the collector of contes sales. Your novels 
 are not readable, because they are written with 
 an eye to a bookstall-monopolist's censorship, 
 whilst the materials for a modern " Tom Jones" 
 or " Roderic Random," chronicles of the flesh 
 and blood of to-day, are lost to posterity ; and 
 a faithful picture of the life of our time will be 
 better gleaned from the files of the divorce and 
 police reports and the maunderings of the 
 ladies' papers than from the pages of contem- 
 porary fiction ! 
 
 " I have only found two things of^vital im- 
 portance — love and laughter. They^ are the 
 cardinal virtues, all the others follow. As loving 
 was the first, so it is the last of the fine arts — 
 aristocratic from instinct. The true lover is born 
 
 II 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 an expert, and needs no apprenticeship. The 
 philanderer may improve by practice ; the 
 amorist is at best but a hybrid lover, always 
 chasing the san grail of true love and fidelity, 
 and getting entangled on the way in the mesh 
 of his senses. Love is religion. But you have 
 so many forms of belief that one has to confess 
 oneself a heretic to escape being torn to pieces 
 in the interest of some special form of the True 
 Faith. One has to step outside the pale of 
 orthodoxy in order to find a quiet fane where 
 one can commune with one's God at the altar 
 of one's own form of worship. Love — Love is 
 the keystone of the human bridge spanning 
 time and eternity, and the waters of life flow 
 under it, and it ripples with wavelets of laughter 
 and whispers of joy, or rushes sullenly and 
 murkily, just as the heart-beats of the pilgrims 
 who cross it time their feet to a measure ot 
 mirth or sadness. 
 
 " Love is the Master Art, the ever incom- 
 mensurable, the all-conquering ! — the iconoclast 
 who laughs at all social distinctions — stronger 
 than death, for death can but slay one soul, love 
 may destroy two. It steals upon you unawares, 
 and lo ! you are a captive for evermore — a will- 
 
 12 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 ing slave bartering your liberty with a lilt on 
 your lips — aye, risking damnation for possession, 
 for your true lover will sign his name with a 
 smile to any ' bill of adventure ' when the ship 
 is bound for ' the magic ocean.' " 
 
 I wish I could give the quivering flashes of 
 light and shadow in her eyes, the swift play of 
 lips and brows. We who loved her always 
 expected great things of her, and she used to 
 laugh and say with the flashing smile that was a 
 caress to those it met : " Genius, I .'' No, I have 
 a pretty talent for loving, that is all ! " I 
 scarcely knew if she was beautiful, one was only 
 conscious of the soul and spirit of her, she was 
 like a white flame in a lamp of opal. Sometimes 
 I missed her for months, aye, years, and then 
 she would flutter back to my embrace and my 
 fireside, as a tired white moth with its wirigs 
 sore beaten by storm gusts. 
 
 I never asked her any questions — " Heart o' 
 Gold " was back, that was enough, and then the 
 white flame would leap and illumine places that 
 had grown dark in her absence — I was always 
 the richer by her coming. She was a witch of 
 a woman, with sudden tenderness and a rare 
 vitality, a subtle magnetism in her wile-weaving 
 
 13 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 body. Her voice was full of tender inflection, 
 but could cut keen as a scimitar when influenced 
 by disdain or scorn. Restless herself as the 
 spirit of wind or wave, there was always a sense 
 of restfulness in her nearness ; she had the divine 
 gift of perfect understanding. She had no 
 doubts ; life was always an open book to her, 
 each day the ribbon to mark a fresh page for 
 perusal, and on every page of it adventure. 
 She had the frank paganism of a healthy child- 
 nature, and she looked at everything with the 
 direct undaunted gaze of a fearless child. " I 
 am not in the least extraordinary," she often 
 said ; " the only difi^erence is that I dare to be 
 entirely natural, My so-called subtleties are all 
 simplicities." Things were natural or unnatural, 
 true or untrue ; the latter was the only sin. She 
 had a fine contempt for mere reason. " Instinct," 
 she used to say, " is a finer quality." I can see 
 her eyes, as I write ; they repelled at a first 
 meeting, I can recall how they pierced me 
 through as two electric needles of surprising 
 keenness, so that I felt pinned to the wall, whilst 
 the spirit behind them searched me through and 
 through and then let me go, enveloping me in 
 a gaze that warmed and enthralled me. I wish 
 
 H 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 I could recall her many sayings, her definitions 
 of love and its value. 
 
 " To me the gift of loving is the greatest 
 thing I own. The fountain of life — in my 
 house of life ; the sweetest smelling rose in the 
 garden of my soul ; the white light burning in 
 the sanctuary of my senses ; the inner whisper 
 of music intoning harmonies. 
 
 " A genius for loving is beyond all price, is 
 beyond all dreams, all talents, all capabilities ; 
 a fountain of Jouvence, out of which the spirit 
 rises in perennial youth, a precious euphrasy to 
 give one the child-gaze into life and the things 
 of living. This finer eroticism is as far re- 
 moved from mere sensual gratification as the 
 lily flower from the compost the gardener lays 
 to its roots. To know of a well-spring of love 
 in oneself is to be rich for all time. The true 
 lover must ever have some quality of greatness, 
 must risk all with no huckster eye to profit and 
 loss, dare all and everything ; must give un- 
 ceasingly, unsparingly, unheedingly, prodigal of 
 tenderness, a very spendthrift of caressing 
 whimsies. I hate a barterer in the things of 
 love — a love-monger. One can go bankrupt 
 in love as in all businesses — if one makes a 
 
 IS 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 trade of it. Why be afraid ? I believe in 
 giving — the more one gives the more room 
 one makes for the storing of new emotions. 
 Love is the only factor which can negative the 
 materialism which threatens to swamp all human 
 efforts towards spiritual advancement. Hitherto 
 man has been the master lover ; the chronicles 
 of woman's love have been but tales of sacrifice. 
 But I say to you, George, and to all women — 
 you have that in you, if you are not afraid 
 (now when man has, not seldom too generously, 
 opened the portals of life for you) that which 
 can regenerate the world through love again ! 
 I say, not afraid. One is never really free until 
 one has got right inside oneself, ready to 
 explore the dark crannies in one's soul and own 
 up to the cul de sac ; until one can turn round 
 and round like a dog on a mat taking comfort 
 in one's detachment, for so one can dream best, 
 and what is more important, love best ! Man 
 can teach you nothing of love or the things of 
 love, if you listen to the intuitive whispers in 
 your own woman's soul — you have all the 
 mysteries there, his and your own ! But re- 
 member — and it is that you are in danger of 
 forgetting — the more absolutely unlike you 
 
 i6 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 remain to him, the greater your power ! You 
 have competed now in all the academies, stormed 
 most of the closed doors of male enterprise, 
 held your own in all the callings of life — the 
 one thing you haven't done is learned to love 
 better, and when all is said and done, cry as you 
 may against it, Love is the one thing needful 
 for you. Not so much how you are loved or 
 who loves you, but how you yourself love and 
 whom you love." 
 
 Her letters give a year of her own life and 
 the part her love played in it. I have only 
 excluded a sentence here and there where 
 names were mentioned, and matters treated of 
 a purely private nature, and her own words 
 must be my excuse for publishing them. 
 
 GEORGE EGERTON. 
 
 17 
 
Kiel, Railway Station, 5.30 a.m. 
 
 My own dear Love, my darling Boy, — 
 Arrived at 5 o'clock and came straight here 
 from the steamer ; we had a very quiet crossing 
 from Kurs5. It is absolutely quiet, the waiting- 
 room is deserted ; the waiter found me a piece 
 of paper, and I feel I must send you a line. I 
 am only now realising fully what absence from 
 you will mean. How difficult it is to take 
 every step which leads me farther from you, 
 how heavily my heart lags behind whilst my 
 will forces me on. I am one aching wish to be 
 back with you ; I cannot forget your face, your 
 white, strained face, and the misery in your 
 dear eyes. Yet it is perhaps harder for you 
 than for me, and God knows it is hard enough 
 for me — but it is in your nature to mistrust 
 happiness, to expect hard buffets from fate ; I 
 
 19 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 am more sanguine, not alone that I am more 
 sure of myself; but I am more dogged at 
 opposition, more ready to come to handigrips 
 with adversity and fight inch by inch for the 
 object I have in view, to dare fate down me. 
 
 My poor love, my heart's own ! how can I 
 make you realise that I am with you every 
 minute of existence, that I am now really one 
 with you ? I have kept my watch at your time, 
 I know what you are doing, I went to you last 
 night at the hour I knew you would try to 
 sleep, I felt how you stretched out your arms, 
 how you called on me and how you suffered at 
 the silence and the void. Believe me, I am 
 near you, never away from you — never again. 
 
 Remember I told you that in case of any 
 urgent need I would go to you and you should 
 come to me. You are now an integral part of my 
 life. Everything I see strikes me in a new way 
 because I find myself thinking in what way you 
 would see it, how it would affect you. That 
 was my first thought as I sat here sipping my 
 coffee. I remembered how you said that the 
 dislike of all other nations of Germany was 
 based on an instinctive fear, not a rational one, 
 therefjore well founded. I think you are right. 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 This extraordinary station is an admirable place 
 to realise why. It might serve as a keynote to 
 the understanding of this growing nation. It 
 is not that it is colossal ; we have tremendous 
 railway stations in London, but nothing like 
 this. Ours are merely great erections to facili- 
 tate the beginning and ending of journeys. 
 This impresses one differently somehow. It is 
 a concrete embodiment of modern Germany, it 
 gives one an idea of order, of military discipline; 
 more than that, of a national idea or ideal. 
 The very spirit of the nation cements the stone 
 and marble. The architect kept the glorifica- 
 tion of his country in view, its spirit of expan- 
 sion the pan-Germanic idea. I fancy nationality 
 IS a faith with these people more than an idea, 
 and the head of the state is helpful, because he 
 is perhaps the only crowned head left who really 
 believes he is God-anointed. 
 
 A year ago I should never have had any such 
 thoughts : you see how it is with me. From this 
 out life will be a journey by easy stages to end 
 in meeting — the rounding of a circle beginning 
 and ending with ourselves. If the circumstances 
 of your life admitted of our union now, it would 
 be a great temptation to follow the impulse of 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 my heart and stay with you — but you and I both 
 know, that even if it could be, the course we 
 have agreed upon is best for us both — ^best, 
 taking the peculiarities of our temperaments 
 into consideration. I am an independent way- 
 ward thing in all my outward moods, if the 
 fundamental chord in my inner self is always 
 tuned to the one key. Yours is a difficixlt 
 nature to fathom. You have a wounded place 
 in you that even the woman who loves you must 
 learn to treat tenderly. It is entirely well for 
 our future happiness that we should learn to 
 know one another better through our letter life 
 until we meet again. You will grow in con- 
 fidence to yourself and me ! I know, dear, I 
 know that your faith and trust in me are un- 
 bounded, but I know also that you would 
 doubt in time, because with you everything 
 must filter in slowly, become part of yourself, 
 your egoistic ego as it were, before you really 
 accept it. When I prove to you as the months 
 tell their tale that my face will be ever turned 
 to you, that where you are is my heart home, 
 that you own me, every fibre of my body, every 
 stir of my senses, every throb of my heart, 
 then, and then only will you be completely 
 
 22 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 satisfied. I too must be sure of myself, sure 
 that when removed from the physical influence, 
 the personal magnetism you exercise over me 
 and which makes me a bondswoman to my wish 
 to be loved by you, that I shall still desire to 
 be bondswoman, but of my own will, at my 
 own election in obedience to a necessity (I say 
 advisedly necessity) of my whole nature ; thus 
 yours, and yours only. 
 
 Keep a brave heart, trust me, believe in me 
 and above all love me. Think when you read 
 this that I put my arms round your neck, that 
 I look into your eyes as I used to do, that I let 
 all the gladness, the content, the delight in feel- 
 ing myself yours creep into them again, that I 
 bend to give you my mouth and say my dear, 
 dear love I am all your very own ; every inch 
 of my body, every secret cranny of the soul of 
 me. I go from you only in order to get nearer 
 to you, I am yours in absence, as loyally as if I 
 were never out of the reach of your staying 
 hand, my soul shall be as a mirror in which you 
 can see yourself reflected at all hours of the day 
 and night, my will a lever to lift aside every 
 barrier between us and the truer understanding 
 of ourselves. Whatever is of brightness, of 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 good or hopeful in me, I shall try to let you 
 feel through my written words to you. I will 
 give you the sight of my eyes, in as far as I can 
 with mere words limn what I see on paper ; 
 I will try to prison my random thoughts so 
 that you may note the workings of my mind ; 
 I will actualise the dream in my woman's soul, 
 hark to the stirring in my senses, listen to the 
 whispers in my heart and send them all to you, 
 that you may learn to know the spirit in me as 
 you have learned to love the body of me. Do 
 you remember that evening I sat on your lap 
 like a docile child and we read together.'' I 
 always reached the end of the page first and 
 held it ready to turn over, whilst my eyes 
 watched your face, partly because I liked to, 
 partly that I might see when you would reach 
 the last word. Sometimes I kissed you, always 
 when you looked at me before you went on to 
 the new page. 
 
 It shall be like that, dear heart, with our 
 letters ; I will make myself an open book 
 for your perusal. Everything I have noticed 
 on the way has appealed to me in a new 
 way, no longer in relation to myself alone 
 but always to you also. The clock tells me I 
 24 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 must stop, but I shall be with you all the way. 
 I am anxious to get to my journey's end, for I 
 shall find your letters waiting for me — I have 
 only one tiny scrap of writing from you as yet. 
 Good-bye for a little while, my heart's desire, 
 my dear, dear one, take me to you ; you didn't 
 know you hurt me a little when you crushed 
 me to you in your distress at losing me, I felt it 
 for hours afterwards, but would not have had it 
 otherwise. Keep glad, hopeful, wait with per- 
 fect trust. Say to yourself if you despond — 
 She is mine, mine, all mine, I must not doubt 
 her word — if you listen I am sure you will hear 
 my voice somewhere in your own soul echoing — 
 I love you, love you, love you. 
 
 Always your R.A. 
 
 25 
 
II 
 
 My Own, my very, very Own, — You joy- 
 bringer ! You maker of spring in my heart ! 
 I am so glad to-day that I feel all the world is 
 good and it is well with life, and the whole of 
 me is a Te Deum. I laugh, and I know not 
 why I am laughing ; my lips form a prayer 
 half unconsciously. How we love God when 
 we are happy ! Spring is whispering, whisper- 
 ing insidiously, secrets of kinship to the gene- 
 rative principle in the earth, the air, the beast 
 and bird, and all things in this good glad world ! 
 There is an answering spring in my feet, that 
 makes walking a tripping measure to the rhythm 
 of a mystic melody in the senses of me. 
 
 I wish I could send you the breath of the 
 year's time, for you are still in winter. I have 
 put on a new gown, the colour you like, and I 
 have found enough violets to make a posy for 
 my breast ; I wish you could see me, that I could 
 26 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 pop up, as I often did, suddenly beside you, 
 slipping my hand through your arm, watching to 
 see the welcome fill your eyes. Such moments 
 are worth a hundred pre-arranged meetings. A 
 blackbird is calling from a copse, " Won't you 
 wait a bit, wait a bit ! " — tiresome, reiterative 
 thing to whisper of waiting, when my soul is a 
 tip-toe with impatience, when the young impul- 
 sive spring is calling in my blood and the whole 
 of Nature is chanting litanies of life and loving. 
 When overhead there is a flip, flip of whirring, 
 thrumming wings, peculiar to birds as they kiss 
 on the wing in courting time. 
 
 It is an exquisite world, for the cold kept 
 some of the early blossoms back ; and now, 
 in response to the sudden more ardent call, 
 they are flowering extravagantly, as if in 
 apology for their timorousness. Tardy, flush- 
 ing almond-flowers, all ashamed of appearing 
 with the forward cherry ! An exquisite, exqui- 
 site dainty world of dripping cherry-blooms, 
 and delicate perfume and amorous birds. Why 
 am I not with you ? What a waste of love, 
 of life, of happiness ! For why ? Tell the 
 ft-uth, soul of mine ! Because we were afraid 
 to risk, risk, risk ! But it is coming nearer, 
 
 ^7 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 nearer, and when the spring calls up there 
 with you, and the young summer has chas- 
 tened his audacious freshness with us, you will 
 call and I will go ! 
 
 How good that you have got through that 
 tiresome examination — the last real obstacle 
 between us ! How the birds call ! I envy 
 them because they are happier than I am! I have 
 not seen the world with just the same eyes as 
 to-day for more than a decade of years. Have 
 you not noticed that when we were children we 
 saw everything more as a whole ? The entire 
 picture struck our senses, and all our senses 
 vividly, and more than was in the picture, too 
 — the parable behind it. As we grow older we 
 lose the clean lines, we stipple at our pictures, 
 see details, are for ever making comparisons. 
 We see less as artists, more as journalists ; for 
 all children have the eyesight of great painters, 
 and not a little the fancy of true poets. They 
 see at one glance the essentials ; I can recall 
 pictures, whole galleries of completely rounded 
 impressions. There was no yesterday and no 
 to-morrow ! One was oneself, one open-eyed 
 wonder at the splendid present ! 
 
 I can remember a spring day in an old garden, 
 z8 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 and I can taste again a piece of apple-cake the 
 cook gave me when I asked her for the key 
 to enter it. I can recollect quite well keeping 
 back one delectable morsel of apple " for the 
 last," and breaking off the crispy, scrumpy 
 bits, browned in the baking around the edge, 
 so as not to lose any when biting into it. I 
 could not see a garden in the same way to-day, 
 could not get that complete, perfect impression 
 of a wondrously beautiful whole, a tender green 
 delight, speaking to every sense and whispering 
 of God's wonder. The tiny primulas — now I 
 should think the colours ugly — were a marvel, 
 as they thrust their pinkish-lilac flower above 
 the brown earth ; every snowdrop gave an idea 
 of purity, and the moss on the gnarled trunk of 
 the old peach-apple tree was more marvellous 
 than velvet ; I always fancied the fairies and 
 flower elves had the entrance to their own king- 
 dom through the mystic openings in its bole. 
 There was a gorgeous bed of stately tulips, too ; 
 they reminded me of the wives of the Doges of 
 Venice; and rows of waxen hyacinths. I dis- 
 liked their perfume intensely. I have loathed 
 all my life "thick" sweet odours, liking the 
 " thin " scents best ; indeed, I am never in sym- 
 
 29 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 pathy with a man or woman who confesses to a 
 partiality for tuberose or magnolia; I generally 
 discover a spiritual antagonism. 
 
 I can recall every tree in that old garden, 
 every bush where the different birds — unvarying 
 yearly tenants, with an undisturbed tenure — 
 fashioned their nests. I can remember, too, the 
 same town on a wet night. The glistening streets, 
 the dim shining lights in the old-fashioned hang- 
 ing lamps, the soft fresh coolness on one's cheeks, 
 the rhythm of the water, plashing and trickling 
 on the gutters; above all, the young glad feel- 
 ing of being alive — ay, that it was good, just 
 good, to be alive, and wet days were part of 
 the splendid game ! I could see in one glance 
 the whole of the street, the physiognomy of 
 the houses, the character, as it were, of the hall 
 doors, the angles made by the cross streets, the 
 new toys (it was Christmas week) in the win- 
 dows ; glimpses of interiors which struck me as 
 whimsically described scenes out of Dickens. 
 I could read him then. An old cobbler laugh- 
 ing, with hammer poised, at a little girl with 
 round eyes and a golden mop tangling out 
 under a ragged crochet hood. She had been 
 crying, and he had stuck her Dutch doll in a 
 30 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ump of cobbler's wax on the bench. I can see 
 t now, with its legs stuck airily in the air and 
 ts wooden head askew, wileing the small woman 
 if woe to smiles. 
 
 The best gift God can give a man is the 
 acuity of seeing with a child's eyes and feel- 
 tig with a child's heart through all the days of 
 is natural life. The right version of " those 
 i^hom the gods love die young " never meant 
 hat they were cut off in the flower of youth, 
 lut that they keep it intact through all the 
 ears of life, to die still young when the 
 ale of the years registers them amongst the 
 ged ! Sometimes now when I go to a strange 
 lace, and have thrown aside all thoughts of 
 very one and the responsibilities that come 
 rith human ties, I can get a sharp, clear, whole 
 Tipression of a fresh scene ; can throw myself 
 ito the hour, and meet people with the same 
 nquestioning trust as in the old good days ! 
 ut alas ! always more and more rarely. 
 
 You had the same faculty as a child, but you 
 rere always, I fancy, more eager for companion- 
 bip, less single-souled than I was. I can remem- 
 er^how you told me of evenings when you used 
 D sit in the inner room by the oven on a little 
 31 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 birch-bark chair, and watch your father and 
 mother, and ponder on the meaning of your 
 parents' lives. I can see him quite plainly from 
 your description, through the door of the other 
 room, playing cards with his chums. I can see the 
 doctor with the silk skull-cap, and fringed stock 
 and the purple nose ; and the schoolmaster who 
 had asthma and wheezed like a leaky bellows ; 
 and the big red-faced district magistrate who 
 wore a peaked fur cap and Jack boots greased 
 with tallow. I can see the brass lamp, and the 
 old green bottles with the plated neck-rims and 
 the hissing Samovar. I can smell (that I am 
 certain you never could) the very foreign smell 
 of it all ; we haven't that smell over here. And 
 near you in the inner room with the Ikon in the 
 corner, glowing gold and red and blue in the 
 half-gloom, the waxen St. Catherine, with the 
 austere, pallid face that always reminded you of 
 your mother. 
 
 And your mother : I can feel with you again 
 the aching desire of your poor litde starving 
 child-heart to creep to her, and curl like a 
 chill puppy on the • carpet of her gown, nestle 
 to her feet. That all-seeing, all-wise child 
 instinct, which makes childhood with its pains 
 32 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 id disillusions, and searing slights and fierce 
 sentments so keen a period of suffering. I 
 .n fathom the acute sensitiveness which made 
 )u keep aloof and watch her yearningly, I can 
 e her look up from her knitting, from the 
 )ok on the table next her, look in at your 
 ther and his companions, draw her lips tighter 
 id half turn her chair as if to shut them out ; 
 ;ar her low, concentrated, impatient " Get a 
 )ok or your soldiers, child, you have a hateful 
 ibit of staring ! " I can feel your little heart 
 )ntract and curl round like a leaf withering 
 ;fore the touch of autumn blasts. And I want, 
 ant to uncurl it — isn't that what I have been 
 ying to do for the last year ? Want to lay it 
 I my palm and breathe warmly, steadily on it. 
 is the little things, the common every-day 
 ings which steal in and make us all curd soft. 
 I remember I once said to you, speaking of 
 y'^self casting " toss balls " in green, green 
 sh fields : " You were perhaps pegging tops or 
 lying some extraordinary game with a terrible, 
 pronounceable name ! " and you replied 
 nply : "I never played, I read newspapers, 
 d "they only told of famine and riots and 
 iperial ukases, each one fathering a peasant's 
 33 c 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 curse." You were so surprised because the 
 tears came and because I kissed your eyes and 
 cheeks and mouth with sudden fervour, and 
 rocked you in my arms with a rush of tender- 
 ness. Well, I am glad I spent much time in 
 play. I can smell the toss balls, " sweet balls," 
 again ; can see the meadows with the canal, 
 more like a gracious river just there, running 
 swiftly through the flower-decked banks. It had 
 a bragging Irish brogue, that canal, and told all 
 sorts of tales of the building of grand locks and 
 bridges and barges and doings in Dublin. 
 
 You don't know what " toss balls " are. You 
 pick cowslips ; I cannot find them in your dic- 
 tionary, but in Norsk they call them " Mary's 
 key-strings." It is singular how the worship of 
 Mary has left fragrant footmarks in the flower 
 names of that Lutheran country. They have 
 her apron and her hairpins, her golden shoes 
 and hair-sieve, and many other belongings ; 
 but in Sweden they not seldom assign the same 
 plant to the Lady Venus, perhaps the older form 
 of the same cult — now you know which flower 
 I mean. Well, one breaks off the stalks and 
 stretches a string taut, two hold it, and a 
 third threads the flowers close together along 
 3+ 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 it, then the string is drawn together and 
 tied so that all the flowers turn blossom out- 
 wards, a fragrant, exquisite fretted golden ball, 
 with dottings of ochre red. I can see the fields, 
 and the gracious blue of the sky, and the bright 
 ball circling from one eager hand to the other to 
 the cry of " Tisty, tosty, tell me true, shall I have 
 a lover too ? " I have the gaiety of it somewhere 
 in me yet — are you the answer to the question ? 
 Youth ought to be play-time ; it's whole- 
 somer education than cramming. I am glad 
 of my lawless upbringing, in which punish- 
 ment, nor, indeed, any admonition, played a 
 part. I can see the mother sitting on the 
 hearthrug, a long braid of satin black hair, 
 bronze when the firelight caught it, hanging 
 down her back over her crimson shoulder shawl. 
 She is helping us to roast chestnuts. Can see 
 her teeth gleam like freshly peeled almonds, 
 and her eyes sparkle as she smiled, and 
 when she smiled one had to kiss her some- 
 where, on the tip of her little worn bronze 
 slipper, the end of her tail of hair, or the side 
 of her throat, and when we all tried to kiss 
 her* together she sometimes fell over, a child 
 amongst her children. And we adored her — 
 
 35 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 sprawled over her like whelps, and we laughed 
 when she laughed and wept when she wept, and 
 we always made her eat the creamiest chestnuts ; 
 and we went about with a constant fear of 
 losing her, the dearest, best playmate we ever 
 had ; and we always added in catechism class, at 
 the sentence " One must love God above all 
 and before all ! " a reservatio mentalis of our 
 own, in which we told God quite privately that 
 we didn't and we couldn't, for we loved her best. 
 And if it could have been put to the test, I 
 believe we would have one and aH, with our 
 hot, undisciplined, passionate child hearts, have 
 suffered torments and the assurance of pro- 
 spective damnation to save her a pang. The 
 child is the woman in miniature. The memory 
 of my " sweet balls " works in me still, heart's 
 own ! and I have never forgotten how to play 
 in reality; perhaps even then I was storing up 
 joy towards the time, at the end of long wander- 
 ing, when I was to meet the one soul to whom 
 whatever of treasure there is in myself might 
 bring healing and gladness. 
 
 What was it you said so prettily ? " It 
 is with me as if I have been a wanderer, sit- 
 ting by the wayside barren in aU that makes 
 36 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 fe worth; then suddenly you came and gave 
 le the precious casket of yourself, and the 
 ears have dropped away from me, and the 
 ughter and the joyance and the careless frank 
 utlook of youth for which I have yearned 
 ) and never possessed have come to me in 
 
 richer measure than ever I hoped for in 
 reams — and in return you say, ' Love me ; 
 ike care of me; make me yours,' as if life 
 3uld hold better than the realisation of that 
 ish." Oh ! the spring has crept into me, 
 >ve, and I cannot wait long now; I want you 
 ) lift me up in your arms, out into the free air, 
 id to carry me up to some place where we two 
 5uld be alone with the spring in our own hearts, 
 id in God's good world about us. 
 
 The whole of Nature is rippling with laugh- 
 ;r; it is in the brook and the leaves and the 
 reeze, in every note of the lilting birds, and 
 :rhaps most of all in myself. I like you ; 
 am fond of you; I care dearly for you; I 
 ish for you, yearn for you, ache for you ; you 
 e dear to me, precious to me, all the world 
 • me, and when all these are added together 
 ief only mean — I love you ! and you me ? 
 ell me, I am one wait to hear 1 
 37 
 
Ill 
 
 May, Sunday Eve. 
 
 Best Beloved ! — You whimsicality in breeches ! 
 You thing of a hundred whimsies, each one 
 a reason for laughter and loving ! You are 
 probably sitting in that disordered den of yours, 
 surrounded by dusty protocols, that not aU 
 the scents of Araby would rid of cigar ; sitting 
 conjuring me to you in the smoke rings 
 — I come behind you ever so softly, and put 
 my hands over your eyes. I know, I can feel 
 you start, I won't keep them very long there, 
 'twere a pity, dear, to hide what I know I 
 should see in them, for love comes graciously, 
 lambently into your eyes — but just long 
 enough to feel you shiver with recognition of 
 what you once called " the dearest touch in the 
 world, unlike all others." And when I take 
 them reluctantly away, you draw in your 
 38 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 )reath sharply, and then you put up your arm 
 .nd I share your chair. 
 
 I am tired, pleasantly tired, and as when I 
 .m glad I go to you for gladness, what more 
 latural than to go to you for rest ? Where 
 lave I been ? what was that you called me ? 
 ' May moth ! with the freshness of the young 
 ummer about me, the perfume of wood worts." 
 *fice thing ! Love makes a poet of you ! I've 
 leen over the hills and far away following a Tom 
 he Piper's Son melody of my own, in search 
 >f a chapel of ease, where they sometimes hold 
 Jenediction. Such an evening ! The east 
 vinds have kept back all the foliage, but the 
 ilossoms, amorous things, as all young things 
 n love in too great haste, have answered the 
 (rhisper of spring and are prodigal of flores- 
 ence. Gracious is the word to best describe 
 he mien which Nature wears to-day. Shall I 
 ell you of my walk ? I know, greedy thing ! 
 lut am I not telling you best that I love you in 
 [iving you the sight of my eyes. 
 
 Listen : across a clover-field, millions and 
 
 nillions of trefoils ; if you are good and don't 
 
 [lake me creep down my back by kissing my 
 
 leck, you may have one I found with four 
 
 39 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 leaves — for luck — our luck ! I was glad, for I 
 was thinking of you, and took it as a good 
 omen for us — for is there anything now we 
 want singly ? Always us, never I. Then past 
 a bend of the river (full to-day, for the mills are 
 resting), rushing under a quaintly constructed 
 wooden bridge. I halted there a moment and 
 watched a school of roach in a slant of sun- 
 lit water, playing " follow my leader " between 
 the washes of green weed. A turn brought me 
 to a hamlet with a diminutive post office and an 
 old rubble-stoned church, with toppling grave- 
 stones sacred to the memory of many local 
 Fidgets and Death. Bad enough to walk 
 through life with the name of Death, but worse 
 still to be branded as a Fidget in one's eternal 
 sleep. 
 
 I never feel dull in a churchyard, for two 
 things always come back to me. One, the 
 remark of a disreputable vagabond with whom 
 I once shared the shelter of a lych-gate during 
 the passing of a summer storm. He was gazing 
 resentfully at the peaceful grave mounds when 
 he turned suddenly and said : " I hate the dead 
 worse nor the livin', they're so darned indif- 
 ferent to the whole bally show ! " And the 
 40 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 other was the romancing of a little brother long 
 since asleep under a stretch of veldt. He used 
 to spend hours, as a merry curly-headed little 
 lad, in a big cemetery ; I asked him once what 
 was the attraction ? " Lots of fun," with his 
 brown eyes dancing : " when the dinner-whistle 
 sounds and all the men go away, I hide near 
 O'Connell's monument, and then a funny old 
 gravestone under a pear-tree is pushed up, and 
 a skeleton jumps out in a brown bone suit, and 
 he has a fiddle made of coffin-wood, and he sits 
 cross-legged on his headstone and gives a scrape, 
 and then lots of the graves, all old ones, open, 
 and they come out — all sorts of whitey-brown 
 bone skeletons — and he plays jigs and reels, 
 and they set to partners and batter away on the 
 gravestones, to ' The Priest in his boots ' and 
 ' The Devil's salutations to a dish o' nettles,' 
 and lots more queer old tunes ; and when 
 they're dry they eat pears ; and the funny thing 
 is that as fast as they eat them they drop out 
 through their ribs," adding with quaint gravity, 
 " it makes rather a mess on the stones." 
 
 Silence everywhere. You don't know what 
 I mean when I say Silence, the Sunday silence 
 of rural England ; it's getting rarer, for the 
 
 41 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 tion Army Band is desecrating it. Past a 
 stead, the orchard a snowdrift of cherry 
 lum bloom, up the rising path that wound 
 1 ridge of gorse-clumped ground ahead of 
 
 Once up there my footfalls made no 
 ., a silent ascent — through the olive-green, 
 ti-flecked bushes. Those in the distance 
 d like fantastic velvet hummocks of shot 
 ind green. Then a stretch of flat upland. 
 
 soared and quivered, and dropped and 
 I again, or hung poised above, emitting 
 1 of intoxicant melody, mad notes, that 
 sted the delirium of passion, the quint- 
 e of joy. 
 
 rou analyse, the quintessence of all joy is 
 n. I stopped suddenly, for straight before 
 ere two heath fowl courting in dance — 
 jumps, quivers, retreats, advances and 
 •ades, with singular notes and strange 
 •ings of wings. I scarcely breathed, but 
 felt my nearness, for they rose with a 
 ;d whirr and throaty screaming cries, and 
 n opposite directions — I hope they will 
 ine another again. Happy birds to court 
 nee on an altar high above the valleys, 
 :he fragrance of clover and whin rising in 
 42 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ncense all around them, to a choir of larks in 
 jlue sky hymning ! I wonder ! suppose I 
 lad turned to meet you, would we have broken 
 nto dithyrambic measures ? 
 
 Laugh ! I can but laugh at the idea of your 
 :utting flourishes as did our feathered lovers. 
 You needn't wrinkle up your brows ; of course, 
 [ always laugh at you. Is not that just one of 
 pur charms for me ? You, you ! Own it,' 
 i^our heart would have danced in your eyes to 
 neet mine, and you know, for I have foolishly 
 :old you, that mine leaps and quivers to a tune 
 3f laughing music when I know you are near. 
 
 Ah, if you could really have looked down 
 Nith me to the prospect below — woods and 
 jlades, trimly tilled fields, and the gable ends 
 Df many a homestead. Why has the word 
 ' home " a new meaning .'' Something stirs in 
 ne when I say it. I used to think of it merely 
 IS a term for a dwelling-place. It means more 
 :han that now, and will mean still more. The 
 :ircle which we will draw round our two selves 
 —our sanctuary for'the sharing of all joys and 
 .11 sorrows, from out where we will shut all the 
 v<ytld — a nest warm and white. The track 
 vas pleasant to walk on, for the heath is resi- 
 43 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 nd gives one's step buoyancy, and led me 
 fh fields of sprouting barley and across 
 a stile. Everywhere patches of tender 
 foliage amongst skeleton trunks and 
 es, the poplars still absolutely bare, 
 had the whimsical effect, against the 
 due of the sky, of having been dragged 
 ;h water and then planted upside down. 
 :oss the road, go over another stile, then 
 [le wood," so ran my directions. I came 
 wood and then stood still. God, dear, 
 iweetness ! The ground was blue with 
 yacinths, one stretch of blue with bosses 
 len primroses. The chalky white of the 
 if Bethlehem peered up inquisitively as it 
 d through the dark green of the hedge, 
 e ivory white whorls of the nettle broke 
 ;per green of the bank lower down. The 
 ice of the wood had an unexpected quality 
 freshness, something intimately sweet, as 
 ell of a freshly laved baby's skin. The 
 i called with tender melancholy insist- 
 nd when I reached the mere where two 
 gyrated slowly on the pivot of their own 
 less, I found the grass there high, hair- 
 Fering a tempting couch. 
 44 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 I sat down ; the scene was too lovely ; I gave 
 up the quest ; what better chapel of ease could I 
 hope to find ? I sat and I wished ; if a wish 
 could incarnate a man, solve the problem of 
 the disintegration of matter, the transport of 
 the atoms through space and reintegration at 
 will, dear love, you would have been with me. 
 I closed my eyes and let the fragrance of an 
 elm tree above me work in through all my 
 senses. I lay back and looked up, and gave 
 quite involuntarily a cry of delight, caught my 
 breath in wonder, for I was under a tree more 
 like the magic trees of fairy lore than any- 
 thing I had ever imagined — an elm, a giant elm 
 in full florescence. Thousands of pale green 
 roses, swaying in clusters with tender shoots 
 and spikes of leafage, just enough to break the 
 sameness of the myriads of rosettes. As the 
 eyes grew accustomed, I could distinguish the 
 tiny seed-specks, cinnamon-hued, on every 
 cluster. And straight up through the wonder- 
 ful rose drifts a diapered fretwork of sky of 
 exquisite bird's-egg blue. A magic tree of 
 tender green roses, myriad whorls of beauty ! 
 
 A chime of bells broke the calm, but not 
 a sound of voice nor sign of humanity. Let 
 45 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ring, just pleasant notes in a glorious 
 [lony and no more. I am conscious all 
 ce, with a strange satisfaction, of how 
 significance they really hold for me. It 
 atestant England ! I find myself saying, 
 a sense of relief. I feel convinced that 
 orbears on the distaff side dip in the 
 :e, and that I would have sided long 
 mth them on the side of individual 
 ence against black-frocked Churchman, 
 d bell, book, and candle gaily, and cried, 
 
 with sacerdotal hegemony ! Rosa mys- 
 
 Ora pro nobis! If you tell the truth to 
 slf, it is only in such moments of exalta- 
 that one ever bows in actual worship — 
 ;nts called up in us by beauty, joy, sorrow, 
 ime intimate revelation in a moment of 
 de, almost a turning in the lock of a 
 rsal key to open the portal of the great 
 :ry of our cosmic being, our intimate re- 
 
 to the All Spirit behind, who is never 
 ar revealing himself to us as when we are 
 with Nature. Have you not felt it ever 
 3me moonlight night at sea when the 
 led order of the billion stars overhead 
 Hates in the restless mirror below and the 
 46 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 witch moon draws you magnetically ; or in a 
 dark forest when a hundred unseen eyes peer at 
 you, and the trees have a human companion- 
 able quality, and the earth a familiar savour 
 with whispers of kinship ? 
 
 Worship worthy of the great Spirit behind 
 the All, worship, heaven storming in its exul- 
 tant recognition of the divinity in oneself, 
 soaring on threads of light to the throne of 
 the great Spirit — proud because conscious of 
 one's atom value in the wondrous whole ; 
 humble because of the bar one's material 
 sheath imposes upon clear understanding. All 
 other worship is perfunctory, audacious in the 
 impertinence of its distractions ; for confess, 
 have you not noted the specks on your nails, 
 or the cracks in the patent of your Sunday 
 boots in the Holy of Holies ? 
 
 The elm overhead is my Rosa mystica ! 
 Every flicker of sunlight conjures a fresh 
 picture. A breeze steals tip-toe through the 
 undergrowth and sets the censers of the blue- 
 bells all a-swinging with a wild wood incense, 
 while the cushats and larks and blackcaps lead 
 off a whole concerted choir. How we two 
 could hold service here together, just you and 
 47 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 wn high priest and priestess, needing 
 itor to lay our worship at the feet of 
 
 rhimsical idea arises that this is matter 
 mmunication and the fires of Hell ; 
 good folk on the benches down there 
 e us in their mind's eyes getting hence 
 :ft of the judgment bar ! But I slip 
 I in yours, and you hold it tightly 
 our heart, because in that way you have 
 too, and our eyes meet and we smile, 
 here too we are at one, and will take 
 
 mortal and immortal, of the God 
 that is in both of us, because of the 
 il thing that has come to us, and the 
 meness of this temple for worship ! 
 ise desire must have brought you to 
 
 me when you write ! For when I 
 ) rise, I felt how you lifted me to my 
 lield my face in the cup of your hands 
 sed me with a long look, for you knew 
 ive you when you understand !) that in 
 ood I would like that better than your 
 1 so we mounted hillward again. I 
 ,t when you write you will tell me you 
 1 me. Did you feel when we reached 
 48 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the crest of the high land how I turned, and 
 put up my arms and drew your dear head down, 
 and gave ray mouth to your mouth ? — because 
 you had waited. Up there above the valleys, 
 and miUs, and factories, and the traffic of road 
 and river, in the clean and the clear of the wind- 
 swept downs. 
 
 And the sundown mated with my after- 
 noon services. The western sky was a har- 
 mony of gold and yellow, with no touch of 
 common red ; the effect was curious, for in the 
 east the sky was dull with a promise of wind 
 and stress in the huddling clouds ; so that it 
 almost seemed as if they repelled the reflection 
 of the glow in the west, and crushed it down 
 on to the flat lands below — so that the straws 
 in the wheat rick seemed transformed into 
 ingots of purest gold, and gracious shades of 
 aurous light appeared in the ranker meadows ; 
 and the trunks of the pollard willows were 
 copper-red, with a gold alloy, and the whole of 
 Nature seemed to wear a tinge of the purple 
 flush of evening, with motes of gold quivering 
 through its sereneness — and as I turned into the 
 little fruit croft, the topmost sprays and wreaths 
 and tufted bosses of the wondrous white cherry 
 
 49 » 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 tied rose golden in a way that only a 
 artist would dare to limn, 
 ou tired of my talking ? Dear love, I 
 myself, pleasantly tired, and my ankles 
 i were you here you would kneel and 
 my little dusty shoes. Do you remember 
 lughed at you, a laughter that was all 
 ith tenderness, when first you offered me 
 irtesy, you who a year ago would have 
 such service for a woman all menial — I 
 ^ant more than that to-night, much more, 
 church-going has left me in a vestal 
 I should want you to roU up all your 
 e-need into a little tiny pellet and hide 
 somewhere, and then to take me into 
 ns and hold me ever so gently, and just 
 my hair and say : " Rest, little one ! " 
 ou ? I'd trust to it. 
 
 50 
 
IV 
 
 Kind little Lover, — You remind me of a 
 wandering musician I once heard, a genius, for 
 you play on my soul as some mystic harper, 
 setting all the strings a-quiver to a wonderful 
 soothing music — and then you sue with humility 
 as if I were the music maker, and not just the 
 instrument, struck to melody by you, for a 
 dole. You tell me that with me life has worth, 
 without me nothing to offer. " With you I am 
 the richest man in the world, without you I 
 could not even be called poor, for existence will 
 have no value ! " You ask me how I know 
 you are growing stronger ? From your own 
 words, because you say : " I yearn for you, I 
 ache for you, I stretch out my arms for you, I 
 want to draw you close to me, and then my 
 new-born, stronger, worthier self gets the 
 better of me and whispers 'You must not 
 trouble her, not trouble her ! ' and I take your 
 
 SI 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ;ad quietly on my shoulder and smooth 
 air till you fall asleep as if you were, in 
 my little child." 
 
 say that you are daily more drawn to 
 ily happy when with me : " When with 
 notice nothing — my senses are lulled — 
 )ul, intelligence, will, are more alert than 
 Love, darling, the milestones in our 
 F life tell a smaller number every day — 
 y to me that I have taught you how to 
 3ve for a woman, but you beg me to 
 '^ou how to keep the love of a woman — 
 ) keep a woman always for yourself. I 
 1 you a little, not much. You must find 
 r yourself. Go to school in your own 
 -when all is said and done it is most 
 ant for you to keep your love for her. 
 measure as your love is small or big and 
 aurself love worthily or unworthily, so 
 )u be as a man. Your love and you are 
 It is the language of your whole person- 
 Shall I tell you — (I take it that as a true 
 ou want to draw an individual conclusion 
 he generalisation you ask me for) — how to 
 lis woman's love ? < 
 er kiss me from habit. ) Never let me 
 
 52 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 feel your lips touch mine without knowing that 
 the heart and soul of you come along with 
 them. Never demand of me as a right when 
 I am your wife, what you would have to sue 
 for were you my lover or I your mistress : 
 never, never, never ; never let me realise that 
 you desire me as a woman merely with lust of 
 your body ; never make me feel a female. Let 
 me be your woman, chosen out of all women, a 
 thing to be treated reverently, out of deference, 
 if no more, to yourself. Never tell me an 
 untruth or act one with me. Better say to me, 
 " I am a litde weary of you and your caresses, 
 I would be free for a while to myself," than offer 
 me a sedative lie, seek to lull me to a security 
 my intuition would soon tell me was false. 
 
 Let me feel absolutely sure of your obligation 
 of truth to me ; better confess a passing infidelity, 
 not touching on your essential loyalty to me, 
 than try to deceive me. Never let me feel less 
 worthy because you have gained possession of me 
 — I knew a man once who kept his wife a 
 sweetheart always by never failing to keep her 
 supplied with a flower. She never woke to a 
 realisation of having lost her lover in gaining a 
 husband. If you analyse it, the lover is more 
 
 53 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 iry to one's desire of cherishment than 
 
 ise-bond. 
 
 nber too that what is always a satis- 
 
 the man may be a sacrifice to the 
 -a pain not a pleasure. That the 
 jnerous she is, the more care must 
 
 1 who loves her take not to draw 
 fts on her tenderness or wish to 
 m — or fear perhaps to deny him. The 
 I woman is too often treated as a bank 
 lich all her lovers may overdraw their 
 . The man who loves her miist protect 
 done from himself, but from her own 
 
 him — she must feel him as a shield 
 her and all the world, and not least — 
 
 : is my answer to you, and I know 
 sit and ponder on it, I can see you ! 
 I will say maybe to yourself: God 
 , it is difficult ! Not a bit of it — if 
 ; know what the woman you love thinks 
 , and if you are not afraid to let her 
 working of the troll in you, and the 
 Lt you, and perhaps most men, have to 
 n in subjection. 
 
 is, at least in his relations to women, 
 54 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 7 
 much what woman makes him , and she has 
 
 been as second-rate an artist in that direction 
 as in most else she has undertaken. Mothers, 
 sisters, and sweethearts, and in some cases 
 wives, from the time of his first breeching 
 till his manhood have all lied systematically 
 to him about themselves, their wants and 
 their desires ; and when he, rarely having 
 the woman's gift of intuition, her faculty 
 of arriving at conclusions by processes of in- 
 duction or deduction so shadowy as to escape 
 consciousness and elude reason, fails to under- 
 stand her, she rounds on him for his blunder- 
 ing. That is why the good man is often 
 worsted in the eternal game man versus woman, 
 and the scoundrel with a dash of brute in him 
 succeeds each time. No woman in her heart 
 really believes that she is angelic, much less an 
 angel. That is only dear man's hyperbole. Do 
 you remember what poor Nietzsche said "i 
 
 Der Mann schuf das weib — woraus doch ? 
 Aus einer Rippe seines gottes — des Ideals ! 
 
 Man created woman — out of what, then ? 
 Oat of a rib of his God — the ideal. He did 
 more : he fashioned in accordance with his own 
 
 55 
 
■ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 air of wings for her, and she has worn 
 er since to please him — but the first 
 company of women of the world do, 
 ey are alone together, is to lay them 
 h relief. 
 
 smber wondering once as a girl-child 
 lever old Irish attorney meant. He 
 jnfirmed bachelor, but the confidant 
 woman in the county. We went 
 oom full of mirthful matrons in a 
 house one day ; he excused himself 
 nical laughing apology as they stopped 
 rassment, and as he led me away he 
 Ne are better elsewhere, my dear, they 
 g a ladies' story ! " 
 
 )w you shake your dear head, and you 
 my hands, because you quite properly 
 lieve me and you call me in spite 
 cepticism " your own white flame ! " 
 I lift me up and set me on a pedestal, 
 d very small and all unworthy, because 
 always tried to tell the truth to 
 1 much more difficult matter, when 
 d and done, than telling it to other 
 ind I say ever so humbly a little prayer 
 •eat Spirit behind all the problems of 
 56 
 
ROSA AMOROSA' 
 
 you and me and all men — to close your eyes 
 always, even as I do now by brushing your lids 
 gently with my lips, so that you may never take 
 me down for anything I say or do from the 
 height where you have graciously placed me. 
 
 But it is lonely up there, love, and only does 
 on solemn ceremonious occasions when the love in 
 us both almost becomes a religion, revealing the 
 thread of the divine in us. But for every-day 
 life lift me down and let me lay my wings aside 
 and cloister the white flame in the inner sanctuary 
 of myself ; and just think of me as a little faulty 
 human woman, who would like to sit at your 
 knee and watch the faces grow and fade in the 
 fire on a common hearth, whilst the kettle 
 croons a wonderful little song of the poetry of 
 the every day ; sit where I can stay your caress- 
 ing hand with my lips as it strokes what you are 
 pleased to call the dearest head in the world ! 
 
 This is a curious, I am afraid you will think 
 it unsatisfactory, letter ; but it is as I had it in 
 me to write to-night, and so it must go to you — 
 you sorcerer, who has found the " open sesame " 
 to my heart. By the way, have I ever told 
 you *that — strange, marvellous, inconceivable, 
 foolish as it may seem — I love you ! 
 
 57 
 
Midnight, Open Window. 
 
 N Soul ! — I come to you, for I heard 
 I have been reading your last letter 
 
 moonlight. It is a strange meteoric 
 
 There is a curious movement as of the 
 
 clouds at rest, and flashes, scarcely 
 
 io definite as that, of light, the distant 
 of falling stars, sparks struck off the 
 
 shing wheels of the chariot of night. 
 
 Iky way is marvellous, exquisite, a lace- 
 glittering spangles on the blue-grey 
 of Night. And the magic aura of 
 
 jn-lady seems to affect me and to 
 
 loughts obscure in the day lucid in 
 
 r. 
 
 dear letter pained and delighted me. 
 
 coming a long way on the road to me ; 
 
 I to me that every dream of my soul, 
 58 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 every stir of emotion, every throb of my senses, 
 every fleeting light and shadow that flits across 
 my inner consciousness, finds its way to you on 
 some thread of light, some wireless psychical 
 telegraphy stretching between your entity and 
 mine ; for, when I am full of some thoughts, 
 your letter comes and I read your consciousness 
 of what is working in me, your appeal to me to 
 put my thoughts into words for you to read, to 
 make my fancy something concrete that you 
 may possess it. 
 
 You say those two sonnets I sent you made 
 you forget everything in the world for a spell, 
 except " the glory of being loved by you ! " 
 and that you wished to go out on to a high 
 mountain and call out, so that all the world 
 might hear how happy you are ; that you have 
 an idea that every one about you must know 
 intuitively of the great good thing, the wonder- 
 ful stroke of fortune, fate has dealt you ! and 
 you ask me to tell you, because you want it put 
 in my own words, in order that you may test if 
 the newborn intuition in you has interpreted it 
 rightly to you, why I left you when I did, 
 why I hurried away just when we stood at the 
 threshold of our kingdom. 
 
 59 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 love, I wish I could sit near you and 
 I ; it is so hard to write when one has to 
 p for the root of one's reasons. Do you 
 )er — I know you do, I only ask you 
 
 foolish desire to have you tell me so 
 ■the hour we two let our souls confess 
 found one another ? There was more 
 te intention on my part than you knew 
 To know what one wants and to dare to 
 when one finds it near is a stride to the 
 on of happiness. A true lover owes 
 ng to love. I Why should not the great 
 ! a woman ? I Why should an effete ideal } 
 le, worthy of a time when love meant/ 
 . union alone, force a woman to hazard 
 piness by a silence unworthy of her and 
 I ? I think myself cheap when I do a 
 ing in the ordinary way. I am glad I 
 Found you too fine in your thoughts of 
 incline to the conventional and somewhat 
 idea that a woman should keep aloof, j 
 ', bring a man to heel like a hound by/ 
 aed coldness, attract him by making the 
 :nt of her a difficult pursuit, a relic of 
 days of capture by club — I know it is a 
 icy for every woman to follow with all 
 do 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 men. I would sooner be unloved all my life 
 than win a man in that way. 
 
 When did I realise our love first ? At the 
 very first, I think. I only lived in those hours 
 in which you were near me, and I was always 
 conscious that something stirred in you if I 
 came into the room where you were. Do 
 you recall one day I went out on to the 
 veranda to look at a marvellous sunset.'' It 
 was in the first days of our acquaintanceship ; 
 we had not spoken. You were there alone, and 
 I noticed how the blood rushed to your neck 
 although you had not looked round, and I 
 stood and gazed westwards, but I could hear 
 my heart thump so that it seemed to me the 
 whole world around us must hear it, and I 
 felt a kind of childish relief that the others 
 inside, laughing as they took their coffee, made 
 so much noise. And I watched the brazen 
 globe drop slowly to the horizon and then dis- 
 appear with a jerk, as if pulled down suddenly 
 by some unseen hand ; and I turned and our 
 eyes met, and you came nearer, or I went nearer, 
 I have never clearly known which, and we 
 looked at one another. Your eyes lost their 
 normal expression of weariness and distaste, and 
 
 6i 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 one intense startled question broken by 
 of resentment, the resentment of an 
 startled out of his cultivated reserve, 
 almost a fear, and then suddenly it 
 nto a look of devotion that made me 
 draw you to me, as if I had been look- 
 L child to cherish and come unexpectedly 
 ttle thing playing alone, 
 lave told me since that the look in mine 
 you, because it held and probed you, so 
 felt every unworthy thought or action 
 life must be known to me ; and then 
 ce a smile of tenderness grew in them 
 ade you afraid, because it meant the loss 
 Freedom were you to meet it often ; and 
 it carried with it a complete understand- 
 ou and your needs you wanted to drop 
 d bury your face in my gown — but the 
 ame and we saw one another no more 
 T. You kept aloof because you were 
 : to go into bondage, and I sometimes 
 ecause no one had held my thoughts or 
 i my dreams before, and we met every 
 d never spoke, the only two in all that 
 srai unknown to one another, 
 ed, surer of myself every day, and then 
 62 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 one afternoon some one presented you formally 
 to me and we talked and our eyes laughed 
 because we had been speakmg^ojong before — 
 but yours hurt me none the less. 
 
 Sometimes you resented my power over you, 
 and would leave me abruptly and keep away for 
 days, so that I only saw a pale, troubled face, 
 with a moody introspective look, or heard your 
 voice abrupt, irritable, if any one addressed you. 
 Yet I knew that you always were aware of my 
 presence, and that if I were absent you sought 
 restlessly, or asked guardedly, until you dis- 
 covered my whereabouts. Sometimes you 
 would seek me and break your silence and let 
 me see all the morbid crannies in your tortured 
 self, your doubts, disgust of everything, self- 
 distrust and yearning for understanding 
 affection. 
 
 It was a curious scroll you used to unroll for 
 me in such moments, a quaint human document 
 written in such crabbed characters, and yet in 
 between many a golden initial letter and purple 
 patch of thought. I used to note them as I 
 listened. It became a necessity, do you remem- 
 ber, to say go6d-night, and to say it alone — 
 away from prying eyes — do you recall it ? I 
 .63 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ir it was in the long corridor ; I put out 
 I to you, and you looked at me in such 
 way and shivered a little when you 
 dropped it abruptly and hurried away, 
 were never strangers after that. And 
 ■ brought us a tiny step nearer, each day 
 nething of significance. Once, perhaps 
 e forgotten, I sat and talked of some 
 subject with a fresh visitor, was in- 
 and laughed gaily — wondered where 
 re, got uneasy yet stayed talking — 
 i lights flashed out and I caught a 
 of you hurrying away ; you had been 
 quietly there a long time, and you 
 me though I felt you watched me for 
 lys, and when I caught your eyes they 
 I of resentment and reproach — and then 
 yry, for you had no cause for jealousy, 
 t went on and I kept in my room, for it 
 me, and worried me most because I felt 
 jndswoman in a new, strange, unescap- 
 salage. 
 
 one evening I was sitting reading, you 
 ,1 knew your step and I cried "Come in" 
 ig to steady my voice, and you stood 
 lie threshold and scanned my face with 
 64 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 suspicious troubled eyes — queried harshly, 
 " You have been ill ? " I felt that if my face 
 or ringed eyes had failed to tell a straight tale 
 to you, you would have scorched me with a 
 look, and left me as abruptly as you came. I 
 made no answer, I think. You rushed off with 
 the same suddenness — I could hear your nervous 
 step echo down the corridor — and came back 
 with a new book and some violets. I took the 
 sweet things and put them in my breast, and 
 closed the door so that you might see I wished 
 you to stay ; and then all at once your eyes lit 
 up with much more tender fire than you your- 
 self knew, and you pushed me gently into a 
 chair and stood looking at me for a moment, 
 and then you looked round and read the names 
 on my books, took up the little things that 
 were on my table, examined everything with 
 the curiosity of a child. I had added some new 
 verses in a vellum book ; you did not know I 
 wrote, and you took it up and I sprang to my 
 feet and stayed your hand, and you shrank into 
 yourself at once and dropped it as if I had stung 
 you. And I couldn't stand it, and I caught 
 your hand and put the book into it and said : 
 " Don't misunderstand : my most intimate, 
 
 65 E 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 )Solutely most intimate thoughts are in that 
 )ok ; you would like me less if you thought I 
 )uld let you see them before I knew you better 
 -no one has ever seen all of it. It is not mis- 
 ust ; you can take it and keep it if you like, 
 id when I tell you, if ever I do, you can read 
 lem." You remember that, but you don't 
 now how you looked when you gave me your 
 ind, saying : " Thank you for that ! " I very 
 ;arly kissed you ! I used to feel I wanted to 
 ugh at you, you were such a mass of jealousy, 
 (uchiness and whimsies ! I am convinced grey 
 res were given to oddities of your nature as a 
 ispensation of Providence in favour of the one 
 ho loves them. 
 
 And then one day, when the folks and their 
 ilments got on my nerves, and a wild wander 
 lood seized me, I went woodward to explore ; 
 tid climbed higher and higher, intoxicated by 
 le dry clear air, and words kept dancing into 
 [lyme, and I sang the verses as I went ; and 
 ien I saw a wonderfully beautiful tree, and I 
 topped and laid my cheek to it and whispered 
 3 the spirit in it and laughed happily as I said, 
 
 Now I have told you my secret ! " and I 
 ;issed a wound in the bark and ascended again. 
 66 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 Then a summer storm broke and I sought 
 shelter in a rude hut of logs and lichen and 
 bark fashioned by the woodcutter, and I sat 
 there on a couch of bracken and crooned to the 
 rain and the exultant feeling in myself. 
 
 Suddenly I heard a step, your step, and you 
 came straight to it and stood all bewildered, 
 speechless, insanely glad when you saw me and 
 I beckoned you in with a laugh, "the elfin 
 laugh of a wood-wUd spirit, with nothing of 
 flesh and blood in it," as you have told me 
 since, and you sat next me without a word, 
 only looked and looked with questioning eyes ; 
 and then the rain ceased all at once and a sun- 
 slant unrolled a golden carpet to our doorway, 
 and I rose and you followed, and outside I was 
 all shaking with the silence and our nearness. 
 I said ; " There must be a lovely view from 
 there," and I pointed to a flat boulder at the 
 top of the winding road. You said : " Let us 
 see if there is," and your voice was broken and 
 husky, and the water was trickling in crystal 
 rivulets through the grey boulders and brown 
 fir needles, and you turned and lifted me in 
 youf arms and carried me up ; and when we got 
 to the stone you held me a second and then 
 
 67 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 set me down gently and took my hand, and we 
 gazed down at the vast expanse of wood and 
 water and curling smoke-rift, and many a tiny 
 sail glittering like silver crescents in the grey of 
 the valley — and we turned downward in silence 
 and you still held my hand, and we avoided one 
 another's eyes ; but when we reached the high 
 road near the dwelling-houses you stopped and, 
 laid my hand on your other palm and looked 
 curiously at it, as if it were something detached 
 from me, and you laid a kiss in the palm of it 
 and closed my fingers over' it and put it at my 
 side. And I was conscious that the other guests 
 — those who went with rested nerves, and those 
 who came to start " the cure " and heard of us 
 from the others — regarded us inquisitively ; but 
 no one spoke of you to me, but I felt their 
 curious gaze upon us when together. 
 
 Wonderful days ! each day the making of a 
 marvellous tapestry, adding a fresh stitch to the 
 whole broidery ; and the tiny things that made 
 each stitch would have seemed meaningless to 
 any but ourselves. A look, a touch, an acci- 
 dental meeting, the sudden flush or blanching 
 of a face — anything, everything. Then you 
 kept away and I stole to your room, but at 
 68 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the door my courage failed me, and I went 
 softly away. You were asleep in your arm- 
 chair, you say, and woke suddenly with a curi- 
 ous feeling of my nearness, sprang to your feet, 
 and opened the door to see me turn at the 
 stairway. Then I sent you a message one 
 evening, for your eyes haunted me. I can see 
 you again as you came in — pride, resentment, 
 wonderment, gladness, all struggling for mastery. 
 You stood waiting, your hands hanging at your 
 side, your lips white, and your eyes asking what, 
 you and your soul and your body desired ; but 
 no words came. You were smaller than I then, 
 love, for your lips were locked by a pride only 
 founded on a social ficti on — a difference of 
 standing — a banking account. 
 
 Did I say anything ? I don't remember ; I 
 only know my arms found their way round 
 your neck, and my mouth gave itself to you, 
 'and you held me close with a sobbing cry of 
 wonder, awe, and content — and thus we came 
 " home " to ourselves. I think after that we 
 were just happy for a time, childishly happy. 
 Our lips curved into smiles, twin spirits of 
 laughter lurked in our eyes when we met. They 
 asked us what mysterious joke we shared, what 
 
 69 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 had found to laugh at ? They little knew 
 had found ourselves — restless, nervous away 
 m one another, a curious sense of well-being, 
 absolute rest, came over us both when to- 
 her. Physical distress, nervousness, all seemed 
 ier when you were near me, as you say it is 
 en I am with you. 
 
 Do you remember how we used to sometimes 
 an hour together and never speak ? Yet it 
 s different from a lethargic quiet, the apathy 
 ndifFerence — it was a vital quiet, feeding body 
 i soul. Then, as was inevitable, you began 
 suffer, and it reacted on me. It became 
 •der to part, harder to meet ; fever and unrest, 
 ; stress of soul that goes with desire, awoke 
 you, and so I told you I was going. I can't, 
 :n now, love, go back to that evening. You 
 ognised that circumstances, the stage of your 
 eer at which you were, made parting a neces- 
 y, for at least a time, and yet you could not 
 e it ; the tears come when I think back of 
 iir distress. ^ It hurts to love like that. ") All 
 ! old helplessness, distrust of self, morbid 
 ief in sinister designs of fate against you, 
 reased by doubts of your power to hold me 
 you, obsessed you again. 
 70 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 And yet I knew that even were the road 
 clear for us two to walk on, I should still have 
 gone, for I have always known that only by a 
 ^ fusing of the spiritual and the sensual in love 1 
 could I ever hope to obtain the glorious all- 
 ennobled form of love which I desired ; that 
 love which has nothing in common with 
 animal impulse, and which alone would satisfy 
 the needs of my nature. I knew what lurked 
 in you better than you did yourself ; I knew 
 that you were in a measure a slave to the new 
 delight in you, the young man's joy at having 
 found and having won the soul of the woman 
 of his dreams — A^ou were a bondman to your 
 insatiable desire for me,) a serf to the magnetism 
 of my body — but you still held the essence of 
 your soul jealously guarded — afraid to give 
 yourself body and soul to me. And I myself 
 chafed at ray need to subject myself to you, I 
 who had always been a free wild spirit jessed to 
 no man's will. Sometimes I hated you for your 
 power over me, and I realised clearly that your 
 body — for the soul of your love was only coming 
 to full awaking in you — stood between your 
 comprehension of me. It tortured you and 
 troubled me, and was a bar to the understand- 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 of each other for which we both so passion- 
 
 y yearned. 
 
 ■f ow you know why I went away from you 
 
 a year's probation. I recognised that the 
 nee of perfect love for our peculiar natures 
 3t be freedom — spontaneity. To develop 
 dy on individual lines to the ultima thule of 
 
 capabilities — to develop as one to a greater 
 
 fou know this now yourself, for you said in 
 :r letter — " Ours is a vital love, dearest 
 nan in the world, because it is based upon 
 most intimate similarities and dissimilarities, 
 t which is intrinsic and extrinsic in our being 
 lur faults and good qualities as they are 
 etailed by our attraction to one another. 
 : are one being with two bodies — two men's 
 abilities and two men's wills — I have given up 
 cing, for I have found — life can hold nothing 
 ter for me. It is rounded, complete." 
 Dearest, I kiss your hands for that, and 
 ause I know you would not have me kiss 
 ir hand humbly, I will stand in the light near 
 I so that you may see how that speech coaxed 
 •s, not of sorrow, to my eyes. You say — 
 •urs is an indissoluble union in which one 
 72 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 loses nothing of oneself, but remains what one 
 has always been — and yet can surrender oneself 
 wholly to a happiness that is as near perfection 
 as human thought can conceive it. We sought 
 one another from an egoistic starting-point, and 
 the great thing is we found one another just 
 because we did so. We are still the same 
 egoists we have always been in our divergent 
 ways, but we have discovered the same aspira- 
 tions, the same yearnings, the same void in each 
 other that we were always conscious of in our- 
 selves. The wonderful love that is in us both 
 has taught us to know how great, how price- 
 less a treasure such a love is in itself, and what 
 a love-life can be for two entities of such 
 natures, two beings blessed or cursed with such 
 an intense desire, nay, more, absolute need to 
 remain always themselves — be absolutely them- 
 selves and only themselves — to preserve to the 
 full what the Germans call their ' Fursichein- 
 heit,! and what they can be, given full freedom, 
 to one another. And if I desire you near me, 
 desire to hold you close to me, to let love make 
 us two one, to be one with you, body and 
 soul. You surely know now, that only, so long 
 as there is harmony, reciprocity in our mutual 
 
 73 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 sire, only so long will it be a desire of mine 
 possess you. When you want to go back to 
 ; sanctuary of yourself, I will wait ; for your 
 'e will bring you back to me, and only when 
 u return of your own free will, with it in 
 ur eyes to me, will I desire you- again." 
 God ! dearest heart-mate, how I love you 
 en you write like that, and how I wanted you 
 see my eyes when they looked up from 
 .ding it. You dear, dear, fine spun silk of 
 man, so you really wonder why I said you 
 1 come a long way on the road to me ? 
 id this from you, you who couldn't hear the 
 /er chimes of the love-note in your heart 
 :ause of the roar of the troll beast in your 
 ises. A woman wanted some courage to 
 lieve she could control that — nay, I never 
 nted to control you — I love you too well for 
 It — but to show you the way to do that for 
 urself for love of me. 
 
 The moon is like a gloriously burnished 
 tera, there is a susurrus in the poplars, and 
 trickling of water between the reeds, never 
 be heard in the day. See, I have not 
 jwered your letter, and I am tired, and you 
 luld chide me for my heavy eyes if you were 
 74 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 here — and so I will say good-night. Are you 
 asleep already ? If you are I will kiss you so 
 softly that it will not wake you — only make you 
 smile in your sleep as if you dreamt it. You 
 dear, dear love ! My Love ! 
 
 75 
 
VI 
 
 \R Thing, — " My special good lady ! " 
 I call me. You did not know you were 
 ig the identical words of the good knight 
 mcelot to the Queen Guinevere when you 
 ite that- i have translated them back to see 
 :tly what you meant ; one. becomes nice in 
 
 understanding of words when a hair's 
 idth of difference may add a deeper colour 
 loving. You ask me many questions, and, 
 ied, I want to be obedient and answer all; 
 it is so much more tempting to go back and 
 :11 upon all the sweet and tender things in 
 r letter, and tell you the tale of my own 
 ish love for you, you heart troll ! You say 
 , can hear my voice as you read, and because 
 
 love it so you would have me talking ; 
 i^ise man, not to know how precious a thing 
 ; to own a woman who can love in silence ! 
 ^nd you really, really want me to answer all 
 76 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 your queries. I'd like better to sit on your 
 knee, and point out to you each special ugliness 
 of yours, and why they make a tantalising whole. 
 A plague on that book of your friend's with all 
 its reasonings ! She's all wrong, of course, but 
 I'm content to leave the whole world in error 
 (see how the love of one man can narrow a 
 woman) provided you and I, to quote that 
 Queen Guinevere again, " be not mischieved " 
 by our reasonings. I shall want an entirely 
 new term of endearment, a quite novel caress, 
 to pay me for bending to your wishes in this 
 way. Yes, I know, one eyebrow up, the other 
 down, your special note of interrogation. A 
 room lined with mirrors would not cure you of 
 your grimaces. Are you then so poor in the 
 coinage of love's mint .'' Of course I could 
 invent a fresh caress for every day, and a fresh 
 pet name for all the 365. 
 
 Why is she wrong .? Because she tabulates 
 woman and her needs as lexicographers words, 
 and she loses out of sight the one dominant 
 fact in a woman's life — ^her need to love and be 
 loved. She imagines universal suffrage will 
 be a step on the way to remove woman's dis- 
 abilities : woman's biggest disability is, as it 
 
 11 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ays has been, herself. She talks of equal 
 bts for woman, by which she either means 
 itinence for the man, in a way which can 
 [y be called diablement ideal, and not sup- 
 •ted by the history of evolution ; or equal 
 ;nce for the woman, forgetting that she has 
 1 that from time immemorial, except when 
 «fas repugnant to her as an individual. She 
 erlooks the one fact that love is incommen- 
 rable ! The good woman has always been 
 )re eager for the soul of love than the carnal 
 ie of it ; has always been conscious that all 
 ysical union is lacking in beauty and purity, 
 len other than the supreme expression of a 
 iritual attraction between two people ; that 
 E obedience of her body to the behest of duty, 
 bit, or anything but love, was degradation of 
 rself — the demoralisation of two souls. Per- 
 .ps that she has submitted herself so long only 
 ows how blunted she has become in her finest 
 stincts. Any idea which lowers the ideal of 
 ve makes for the brutalisation of the race. 
 I the past she has been only too often a mere 
 lol in the hands of churchmen, a lay-preacher 
 ; it were, for the propagation of their false 
 actrine of renunciation, their prurient teaching 
 78 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 of chastity, and their mistaken appreciation of 
 asceticism and the value of suppressing nature — 
 never, if you analyse it,/ for the regeneration of 
 humanity or the development of herself — ^ 
 always merely for the strengthening and 
 cementing of the bulwarks of the Church, and 
 its power as an autocracy over souls. Under 
 its influence she has only accentuated the 
 cleavage between soul and senses ; and, as a 
 result, her power has been always less than that 
 of her coarser-fibred sister who was frankly and 
 joyously bete-humaine. She has always been 
 treated as an inferior by ecclesiastical authorities. 
 Now, when she is learning to think for herself, 
 and to see that the senses, too, have their value, 
 and that to deprive love of all sensuousiiess, 
 passion, and desire would be to emasculate and 
 impoverish it, she will know how to assign to 
 each of them its proper place — to fashion 
 out of them a beautiful red clay lamp to hold the 
 flame-essence of her love. Her greatest triumph 
 will be to help man to fuse them into the same 
 harmonious whole which they are in the well- 
 developed self-sure woman of to-day. 
 
 TJie best modern women have a greater 
 energy, a richer complexity, an intenser soul-life 
 
 79 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 than the average man. You tell me you love 
 me for my courage in facing all problems 
 touching me and my interests ; for the quiver- 
 in gmodernity in me, for my " Furmicheinheit " 
 — but that I expect much. That is true, I desire 
 fuller life — I demand more, but, love of my 
 soul, I can give more too. Your friend's book 
 is able, interesting, but she is on the wrong 
 track. Broadly speaking, woman has given 
 most of her energy to a development of mas- 
 culine qualities, instead of a cultivation to the 
 utmost of the best in herself — as woman — ^with 
 the object of producing the finest type of 
 womanhood, the best result of her peculiar 
 physical organisation, her temperament, indivi- 
 duality, wildness — ay, even of her diabolical 
 intuition — for I believe a knowledge of evil 
 comes to a lad from outside, whereas it may 
 come to a girl from some subtle source in her- 
 self — a relic, perhaps, of the days of the whisper 
 of the serpent — for I do not hold with the 
 stoics that the brain of a baby is a tabula rasa. 
 
 Haven't you ever thought that one's brain is 
 a store of negatives — negatives that give all the 
 past of each individual through each link of the 
 chain right to the first origin ? And as one 
 
 80 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 can see the impression on a glass negative, 
 sometimes by holding it to the light, sometimes 
 by extending it flatly over a black background, 
 so it is with our mental negatives. Some stray 
 gleam of light, some accident of shadow play, 
 may present to our inner consciousness pictures 
 of horrific gloom, loathsome sin as well as 
 visions of transcendent beauty. You and I, 
 every one, has had such experiences in a greater 
 or lesser degree. Places we have never visited 
 in this life ; men and women of past ages we 
 have never even known in books ; degradations 
 we have never suffered ; triumphs we have 
 never enjoyed. May not that elusive, unex- 
 plained thing genius, merely be the possession 
 of more highly sensitised plates ; imagination, 
 merely the faculty of seeing the images on the 
 negatives in our store-room ; the gift of poetic 
 expression, merely the selection of the gracious 
 and beautiful, singly or in relation to the others — 
 all possibly merely the unconscious process of 
 "printing off" from the plates stored in our- 
 selves. That the male is the greater artist — (by 
 that I do not mean a man who has exhibited in 
 acadelnies, but the being endowed with a 
 faculty for the revelation of intrinsic beauty for 
 
 82 F 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 own sake alone, without reference to its 
 ■e utility) — is perhaps only because his store 
 nherited memories has been less blurred by 
 sical disturbance, than in the case of the 
 nan. Fathering is joy, relief ; in fact all his 
 aal life is, in its best regulated order, helpful 
 lim. That is scarcely so with the woman. 
 
 her, the struggle to work with head and 
 duce with body at the same time is often 
 tful of harm. In measure as a woman loses 
 
 spirit of her own sex, she will feel the 
 den of it. As the singers in the Vatican, 
 
 may gain a voice of surpassing sweetness in 
 
 direction, but the sacrifice necessary is an 
 ipverishing of the whole of her life, 
 four friend will perhaps answer that there 
 e been a few great women ; and I reply 
 t those who have come down to us most 
 idly through the ages have been beauties or 
 rtesans. All those who have influenced 
 tinies, been destructive or formative agents 
 the lives of men of their time, have done so 
 3ugh some physical or mental, always purely 
 linine charm in their organisation — have 
 n, even when base to the core, whole 
 nen. The mere aper of the male is guilty 
 82 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 of Ihe majeste against her own supreme nature. 
 In the few who have justly, rightly worn the 
 olive crown of fame, I think you will always 
 find a share of some essentially male quality. 
 Indeed, perhaps when we know more of these 
 things, when science will no longer be the 
 exclusive seisin of the initiated, but , we will 
 teach in our Board Schools (by that time their 
 failure as educers of latent capabilities in the 
 unfortunate children consigned to their instruc- 
 tion may have led to their abolishment) that 
 nothing helpful to a clear understanding of 
 ourselves can be wrong ; and that morality has 
 nothing to do with a rational understanding of 
 sex and its meaning — perhaps then we shall 
 understand that a male spirit may be accident- 
 ally held in a perfect female body and vice 
 versa — and that such a combination may explain 
 the — I use the word designedly — anomaly of 
 genius in a woman. The vice versa is more 
 disastrous. In the case of the woman, she may, 
 if the body holding the spirit be sound, turn 
 out a satisfactory mother, though I think her 
 functions would possibly be limited ; and she 
 wottld be at worst a trouble to herself and a 
 puzzle to man ; but in his case he will probably 
 
 83 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 L Species of intellectual eunuch — the male in 
 
 feminised and the female of no sex what- 
 •. The decadent proper rather belongs here. 
 V am I good ? You won't think so when 
 
 have to make an extract of this for her — 
 ' thing ! and I know you will seek back 
 lugh all the letter to find the bits that just 
 :ern we two. There are no other people in 
 world just now, I fancy — just we two ! 
 Tou say you wonder that an ugly, moody 
 e pessimist can satisfy the needs of my 
 ly-sided rich nature. Little honey-tongued 
 :erer ! You say you have as much devotion 
 lassion for me, and beyond both the grateful 
 chment of a rescued man, drifting hopelessly 
 iestruction, to his saviour. You ask me if 
 ly awake on Tuesday and went to you at 
 night, because I really, really was with you, 
 .Uy, really, was I ? Why ask then .'' 
 fou say that I am with you more every day, 
 : suddenly I take your arm in the street in 
 morning, and you pass acquaintances with- 
 
 greeting them. That is strange, because I 
 e thought of you lately every morning (I 
 p a little clock set at your time) at the hour 
 
 would be going to your department. 
 84 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 You say : "I seek nothing in the world 
 better than you ! " Happy man whose needs 
 are compassed by one little woman ; but shall I 
 tell you the truth — one holding a danger for 
 me ? You seek all the world in that one 
 woman ! You say that I come to you in a new 
 way every day, help you, care for you, en- 
 courage you ; you tell me I own you because I 
 led you out of the labyrinth into which you had 
 strayed, a dark place of sceptical brooding — 
 that I have given you courage and an object to 
 live for. I think your own love for me was 
 the thread that led you out of the maze. 
 
 You tell me that you want me insistently, 
 exist only for me, that when you cannot as it 
 were feel me near you, the old sadness, the dis- 
 taste of everything seizes you again ; that I 
 work upon you refreshingly from a distance, 
 that your senses know me, feel me ; that when 
 I suddenly appear a lightsome mood empowers 
 you, and it is well with life and you are happy ; , 
 that whenever you call me I come. Was there 
 ever such an obedient woman ? And the strange 
 thing is that it is true ; I hear you quite plainly, 
 and I hasten to you — for is not every sense a 
 double sense now, a sense with a soul in it ? 
 
 85 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 i^ou tell me that you have nothing, nothing 
 ' longer for yourself alone — least of all your- 
 " ; that you are never solitary in the old sense, 
 at is prettily said of you. But best of all I 
 i when you said : " Can I not feel you stir 
 my arms, do I not hold you closely when I 
 to sleep, but are you not closest of aU in the 
 y soul of me, where the thought of you 
 ices up and down and goes with me wherever 
 JO to a haunting melody that makes each 
 yard step a delight .'' " 
 
 Heart of my heart, tenderly cherished halt 
 me ! where have you learnt to say the things 
 3 woman wants above all to hear ? You 
 gh at me because of my first little cold kisses 
 ke snowflakes blown by some shy breeze to a 
 n's lips." You ought to know that was a 
 npliment to you. I had learned no better 
 y till you taught me, served no light appren- 
 jship, never cheapened myself with playful 
 •tering. Had listened long years to the love- 
 d calling in the Holy of Holies of my own 
 irt. A wise woman will always hold the key 
 that very inner place in her own keeping, 
 tnetimes I stole in there alone, into the 
 ler sanctuary of myself, and lit the lamp, 
 86 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 a crystal lamp, untrimmed by any hands but 
 my own. 
 
 And no man has ever even entered the outer 
 court ; I have sat alone in there with my dreams. 
 But now the door is always ajar, and you come 
 and go there at will, and the echo of your foot- 
 step is pleasant to hear, and your tones penetrate 
 to the inner court ; and as one always hears, or 
 fancies one hears, the murmur of the sea in a 
 shell if one holds it to one's ear, so I now 
 always hear the whisper of your voice in there. 
 I put my arms up round your neck, and if you 
 bend your dear head I will say in your ear what 
 I hear there. — Your little R. A. 
 
 87 
 
VII 
 
 Nicest Man in the World, — I say you good 
 morning ! Such a morning, too : a whole choir 
 of birds intoning matins, no solemn Gregorian 
 chants, but a gracious joyance in the world's 
 beauty and the delight of mating and nest- 
 making. Oh, the freshness of it ! The dew 
 sparkling as if Queen Night had been scattering 
 diamonds with the lavishness of an Eastern 
 potentate on a voyage of conciliation to the 
 West. It pearls like a tear in the eye of the 
 violets, studs the horn of the honeysuckle and 
 the moss sheaths of the roses. It is early, no 
 one is yet astir and I know you are asleep still, 
 but if you wake I will tell you why I have been 
 so early afield, and why I feel so joyous, so 
 childishly glad, and so clean, as if I had been 
 turned inside out morally and mentally, and 
 washed quite white of all stain. 
 
 It was warm last night, and the moon peered 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 in and I could not sleep, so I dressed and 
 wrapped a shawl round me and stole downstairs 
 and went out across the silver fields to the river. 
 I knew you, too, would be asleep, or awake 
 perhaps, for you tell me you are away from the 
 city up by a solitary lake outside the tourist 
 track ; that you sleep on a heap of reindeer 
 moss and dream ; that you find that you are 
 nearer to me now when you can day-dream at 
 leisure ; that you were anxious to see if I would 
 come to you as usual every evening ; and that 
 you were sitting on a boulder looking across the 
 lake watching the clouds dip over the mountains, 
 when all at once you felt me come behind you, 
 and put my hands over your eyes and blow 
 softly under your ear. 
 
 You were quite right, I did go to you just in 
 that way. No use in trying to explain these 
 things. We have our wireless telegraphy. 
 Good things are doubly good if they are beyond 
 the reach of analysis. 
 
 It was warmer last night than ever I have 
 known it in England, silken warm, so that one 
 thought of lagoons with flesh-warm water washes 
 and tropical whisperings, and pearls and coral 
 spikes and gleaming fishes. It was only rela- 
 . 89 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 lively quiet though. Night in Nature in our 
 Isles is never really silent as up with you. One 
 can always hear the rustle of her gown as it 
 were, a perpetual whispering of all kinds of 
 trivial confidences purred into her ear by the 
 trickling of brooks, susurrus of leaves and the 
 flitting of birds and moths. Cocks crow, and 
 dogs bark, and vermin squeal in the hedgerows ; 
 but one can thank God at least for a respite 
 from the clacking of human tongues. Up 
 with you she can be silent in the grand manner, 
 so that to break her superb calm seems an im- 
 pertinence too great for words — almost as if 
 one were to attempt to bawl a cheap joke into 
 the ears of the dead. 
 
 I sat on a felled tree, a giant beech — I saw it 
 cut down a week ago, and every scrape of the 
 saw hurt. You may laugh at me, but it did, it 
 brought back the tapping of a surgical mallet 
 and a little lad I once saw in a hospital theatre. 
 He was being operated on for double osteotomy, 
 and I felt every blow in the marrow of my own 
 bones. When the splendid great tree swayed 
 with a groaning wrench and lay prone I felt 
 sorry enough to whisper sympathy to it : I can 
 never regard trees or plants or any objects which 
 90 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 have the power of movement, such as machinery, 
 or, indeed, in a lesser degree, any object what- 
 ever, as being without some inherent spirit or 
 soul. 
 
 I always pick flowers reluctantly, for I never 
 outgrow my childish fancy that they feel and 
 suffer. I have this sentiment stronger about 
 trees than anything else ; I learn to know them 
 and love them, sometimes to dislike them as if 
 they are actual human beings. I remember an 
 old yew tree I once loathed, a vicious, hateful, 
 gallows bird of a tree that looked as if it might 
 tempt a man to hang himself. For machinery 
 I have a quite unreasoning hatred, coupled with 
 a desire to smash it to pieces. I am childishly 
 afraid of the demon in it — for there is, most 
 machinists grow to believe, a malicious inherent 
 devil in particular machines. The Germans 
 have a sense of this when they talk of the 
 "Heimtiicke des objekts." How would you 
 translate that — " the inherent malice of matter " ? 
 
 Well, I sat on my superb dethroned friend, 
 and watched the river and listened to the sighing 
 night air touching the reeds, those mothers of 
 music, into gentle minor melodies. It was 
 wonderful ; the longer I sat the more I saw. It 
 
 91 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 was as if one's day sight had to adapt itself 
 gradually to the night, and then birds and 
 beasts and moths seemed to become distinct in 
 the gloom, and the moon rose above the trees 
 and scattered largesse of silver into the valley. 
 
 Do you know what I did ? Don't scold me. 
 I simply undressed and went for a swim in the 
 river ; there is a kind of drawbridge, so that it 
 can be pulled back once a year to establish the 
 farmer's right of private way ; and he takes a 
 penny a year from the labourers who make a 
 short cut across it to their work. I swung in 
 by the chains and startled the rats and sent an 
 otter ; I never believed there was one although a 
 " spraint" of some kind marked the grass along 
 the bank, but there he was, sure enough. It 
 was glorious ; the water was warmish and like 
 silk. I tried to sit on the moon, but it slid 
 away on a ripple of gurgling laughter as the 
 water rocked. The water mint emitted fragrance 
 as I crushed it. Pan would have loved to lurk 
 on such a night, even in England. Poor old 
 Goat God, his reed pipe nowadays has a note of 
 music-hall melody, he has deteriorated as most 
 else. The long green washes of reeds caught 
 in my toes and slid over my shoulders ; the 
 
 92 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 buoyancy and snap of salt water with its clear 
 freshness was missing ; yet none the less, it was 
 a delicious moonlight water frolic. 
 
 As I ran across the meadow to my garments 
 my own shadow was startling by its unfami- 
 liarity. I dried with my cambric petticoat and 
 started for a walk, with my shawl over my head, 
 up the lane. It is frightful, when you think of 
 it, that we are never alone enough to go naked. 
 I have often thought that if by some sudden, 
 subtle, painless combustion every shred of wool, 
 cotton, or silk in the world were to be con- 
 sumed, that on people's bodies as well as off, so 
 that the whole world of men and women would 
 suddenly stand in nudity, the moral effect would 
 be colossal. All false shame would die a sum- 
 mary death, and the exigencies of continuing 
 the ordinary duties of life would compel people 
 to cast all consideration of it aside. The 
 common idea of beauty would be entirely revo- 
 lutionised ; the human face would lose its undue 
 prominence and become a mere detail in a 
 whole ; straight, clean limbs and a beautiful 
 form be the only thing admirable ; disease and 
 bodily blemishes the one right cause for shame, 
 and, as a result, concealment. 
 
 93 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 I think a walk in the complete solitude of 
 the night brings one nearer the big essential 
 things in life, the great fundamental truths, the 
 first origin of things, chips off which are always 
 the last new truths when all is said and done. 
 One gets a sense of proportion, realises how 
 infinitesimal an atom one actually is in the 
 cosmos. 
 
 Yet, sitigularly enough, a lucid realisation of 
 this fact need not make for humility nor dis- 
 heartenment, for one feels that one's atom out 
 of place will mar the symmetry of the wondrous 
 whole in a way perhaps too great for our finite 
 comprehension; in spite of the impossibility 
 of our grasping adequately how speck-like our 
 place is in the design. It is just in such a 
 moment that one recognises exultantly that one 
 is the mightiest, the most important thing to 
 oneself in the universe. Indeed, one almost 
 conceives, in such an hour of night communion, 
 the possibility of being the one thing actual — 
 all else, perhaps, phantasms of one's own brain 
 weaving. To confess the truth to oneself 
 means, that one whispers with exultant pride 
 that one is the most important thing in the 
 whole world to oneself — heir to the universe, a 
 
 94 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 non-entailed heritage. That the experience of 
 all men, the march of history with its warriors, 
 monarchs,, and hordes of serfs ; its wars, its 
 epochs of peace, its triumphs and defeats, its 
 pilgrims and religion ; with their tales of woe 
 and joy, love and hate, the poetry of all time, 
 in short — All the past is just an argosy which 
 has sailed down the river of the ages to harbour 
 at one's feet and disburse its marvellous freight 
 for one's benefit. That all that has been in the 
 past and is in the present is only of importance 
 to oneself, in so far as it helps as a means of 
 development to one's best selfhood. 
 
 I had a hundred vagrant fancies I wished to , 
 share with you, you who are nearer to me than / 
 all else in the whole world, so that my soul I 
 leaps like a flame and flutters at the memory of ' 
 your voice, and burns steadily in the assurance { 
 of your love ; you, without whom I feel imper- 
 fect, to whom I must belong if ever I am to be 
 my whole self. 
 
 And if I tell you my crack-brained fancies, 
 perhaps want wit enough speculations, it is 
 because the whole of life has a new meaning 
 through my love for you. You, too, are con- 
 scious that to have me for your own is the only 
 
 95 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ; 
 
 way to feel that you may quit seeking and start 
 life as a completed creature, with all that is 
 necessary to your best equipment as a fighter. 
 In short, you wish to own me, you say, " as the 
 best means of owning yourself." 
 
 Do not think I took my walk with grave 
 pondering on the hidden meaning of big 
 problems. I " shoo'd " beasties in the hedges, 
 and caught myself laughing many a time at 
 extraordinary things I wanted to say to you. 
 New ways of saying the old tale of my love for 
 I you. You as man (though, mind you, you 
 have a dash of woman in the expression of 
 your complete devotion), perhaps, feel more 
 delight, because in me you fancy you have 
 found the woman of your dreams realised ; and 
 your soul content and the gladness in you finds 
 its best expression in the lightening of the old 
 gloom in you, the spur it has been to en- 
 deavour, an incentive to work and take your 
 part as a man, the desire to protect the one you 
 have chosen at all costs. But I, as a woman, 
 realise that it is only when love is the medium, 
 that woman wakes to a complete understanding 
 of herself and all in life. 
 
 Love makes of life a palimpsest ! The moods 
 96 
 
^-^■■^-p'L-c^ y.,^--^:^- 
 
 ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 of Nature are merely settings for the moods of 
 her emotion ; she can never be a true philan- 
 thropist, for the welfare of all humanity is a 
 small thing in the heart of a natural woman, 
 weighed in the balance with the welfare of her 
 " own man." And perhaps this limitation in a 
 generous - souled woman makes her greatest 
 worth — is the keynote of her conservatism, 
 making for solidarity, home - building. For 
 without love, and love for one man or the 
 children conceived willingly and borne to the 
 man of her choice, she is and always will be a 
 jerry-builder in nest-making. The one thing 
 necessary for her is to love, bigly, generously, 
 without exigence, just for the sake of loving ; 
 because it is the "open sesame " to the realisation 
 of her own treasure-self — not as an end to win 
 love, or acquire the right of hobbling a man in 
 his Alp-climbing moods. In measure as she is 
 capable of loving unselfishly so wiU her influence 
 be; for in such measure will she make or mar 
 the fate of the man who loves her. 
 
 When all is said, man perhaps, when he does 
 love, loves better, more singly purposed than 
 woman. He has more to lose by getting into 
 the domestic harness. A chivalrous, unselfish 
 
 97 G 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 man, with the weakness that a lothness to give 
 pain, to be hard when necessary, lends to such a 
 nature, is as helpless as Gulliver in the hands of 
 the Liliputs, in the grip of a woman whose idea 
 of love in marriage is the right to make demands; 
 not alone to hold first mortgage on his life's 
 work and his banking account, but to audit his ( 
 ideals and balance the workings of his conscience. ) 
 What such a woman considers being loved, is 
 five times out of ten, a subservience to her ( 
 wishes on the man's part, which is as fatal to his 
 upward endeavour as locomotor ataxy to a man's 
 gait ; what she calls loving is either an abnega- 
 tion of herself she has ho right to make, or a 
 balancing of accounts in which she always wants 
 to stand on the credit side. 
 
 Just the best thing in the world is that you 
 and I, egoists as we both are, are so completely 
 agreed on this one point : the absolute right to 
 individual freedom, the absolute wrong of any 
 interference with one another, when a question 
 of "right," either for you or me, arises. 
 Neither you nor I believe in any legal tie as 
 binding — it is a concession to public opinion, 
 no more. As long as we two love one another 
 as we do, no power on earth can part us, and 
 98 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 if you should cease to love me, why should I 
 reproach you for that ? as if you could explain 
 love's genesis or its death. To upbraid you 
 would be to punish you for having once loved 
 me ! 
 
 The saddest thing in the whole world, per- 
 haps most because of its futility, is to see a man 
 or woman on their knees trying to fan a dead 
 love into flames in the heart of another. If 
 you loved another woman, it would hurt, dear. 
 God ! I can't bear to think of it ! but I could 
 still be your friend ; I am big enough, I hope, 
 love you dearly enough, am sure enough of 
 myself, to say that ; but — now I am going to be 
 honest with you, even though I can see the 
 laughter-light leap into your eyes — I am afraid, 
 sorely afraid, that, in spite of the fact that you 
 call me your great woman so often, I am not 
 big enough to say that I would not feel a little 
 measure of satisfaction if she were to give you 
 a trying time. Don't make any mistake, I may 
 do that myself on occasion, and I know you so 
 well, yoii thing of intricate and difficult tem- 
 peraqient, not to realise that I may have to hold 
 on and sit tight on my own temper at times. 
 
 We served our apprenticeship, didn't we? 
 99 
 
 ..OsCj^'- 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 It always ended up in the same way. We hated 
 to let the other have the credit of being the one 
 to make up first — at least, I did. There's only 
 one thing in which I am jealous of you ; that is, 
 that you might perchance love me better than I 
 you. Now, I am not telling you at all of the 
 adventure which gave rise to all this disjointed 
 disquisition ; but I must send it to the post if 
 it is to reach the " little village " to-night and 
 cross the Channel on the first stage of its way 
 to you. It is strange to think of it whirling 
 down through the marsh lands of Essex, lying 
 in its sealed bag in the scarlet mail-car as it 
 dashes through the crowded streets, to more 
 train and the chopping swing of the Channel. 
 
 I have quite a grateful, affectionate feeling of 
 interest in every post-office now. So much of 
 joyance and good and glad has come my way 
 since you and I elected to live and love in 
 letters. If ten letters come I feel yours 
 amongst them before I see it, and something 
 in me thumps in a curious inexplicable way in 
 response ; and if any one is there I just read 
 the beginning to see how you come, what you 
 call me, and the end, because you leave me un- 
 willingly and always say your dearest things to 
 
 100 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 console me for going. I put it under my pillow 
 until the next comes, and love each one better 
 than the one before. 
 
 You are calling me all day insistently; it must 
 be because you are all day free, and I am rest- 
 less because of it. I am with you up there in 
 the supreme quiet, believe me I am, love, and 
 don't try to wile the soul out of my body, for I 
 have a strange feeling that sometimes it doesn't 
 dovetail as usual; have a little mercy on your 
 witch-wife. I can see the initials of your name 
 quite plainly in a cloud-rift up there. It's a poor 
 case with me : the only cure will be to go to 
 you soon. Get strong and well and be glad 
 and good, dear heart ; write to me and love me ! 
 and don't scold me for not going to sleep as a 
 rational being, for it's every bit your fault, and 
 I am not an atom tired. It is as well with me 
 as with that insouciant lark up there, and the 
 ' music in me is just as madly, intoxicantlj glad ; 
 and I am convinced that the best thing in the 
 world for me is my love for you, you wizard of 
 surpassing ugliness and surpassing charm ! And 
 the next best is your love for me. 
 
 I know you want me, being a man, to put 
 it the other way round, but I am not afraid to 
 
 lOI 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 stick to the truth — I love you in all the ways 
 of loving, I like to believe no one knows quite 
 so many as I do. Write, write, write ; for four 
 whole days I have had no word, all rose red 
 and tender, as they come with their trick of 
 creeping in and whispering in me until you call 
 again ; I cannot do without a fresh instalment ; I 
 am like a starved robin sueing for a crumb after 
 four days hard frost. Unkind little love ! 
 Would you have me sue? I would not say 
 that were I near, but I am safe, worse luck, so 
 many leagues away. I remember the evening I 
 did, once before, how you leaped into flame, 
 became transfigured, and carried me off my 
 feet, and only set me gently down when you 
 saw that I was shaken into something so unlike 
 myself that even you were penitent. 
 
 Love is an unmerciful recorder of details, 
 but then there are no details when a look, a 
 tone, a word can mean the opening of a magic 
 door to new realms of enchantment. Do you 
 remember in the old fairy tales how those who 
 found the key flower to the entrance of the 
 fairy hills, forgot everything outside in the 
 glamour of the new strange world into which 
 they had accidentally strayed ? We are a little 
 
 lOZ 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 bit like that when together. Love is the only 
 fairy tale left, and conning fairy tales the only 
 royal road to the realities. 
 
 By the way, how have my hands offended ? 
 You have not kissed them once in your letters 
 for ever so many days. I am jealous of every 
 missed caress ! — Your R.A, 
 
 103 
 
VIII 
 
 Heart Friend, True Lover, and Shaper 
 OF MY Destiny ! — I was to teU you my adven- 
 tures of the morning, the one that called to 
 being those verses you think so well of: to 
 one's dream child ! I knew you would ask me 
 what made me think of them — I whom you 
 have called your elfin-eyed spirit wife ! Not 
 altogether ! 'Tis true the wild, wayward spirit 
 in me is the best I own as woman, for it is the 
 red clay vein in me, unbroken through all the 
 ages from time primeval to me ; the spirit which 
 wiU save me ever from becoming the cow-like 
 mother of mediocrities, fathered by habit, out 
 of duty. I never could see any merit in a 
 quiver full of congenital semi-idiots. The man 
 and woman who give one or two beautiful 
 sound-limbed, healthy-souled children to the 
 world are surely more praiseworthy. Do you 
 remember how I shocked that very select 
 104 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 supper party of " rights " when they were dis- 
 cussing the claim of one of your dialect poets 
 for the yearly State Grant, by saying I thought 
 any woman who had produced a prize child had 
 a much greater right to apply for it ? 
 
 Well, to go back to my morning. I had 
 walked, you know, a long way, and it was 
 nearly five when I neared home; and as I 
 crossed the stile and came through the " five 
 acre " the insidiously sweet perfume of the bean 
 field set a keener edge to my appetite : when I 
 got quite close to the old sheep shelter, I saw a 
 tiny rill of smoke and a knife-grinder's hand- 
 cart. I stopped and turned aside to explore, 
 for some one was whistling like a blackbird in 
 flute-like notes, no music-hall or martial ditty, 
 but the sweet and reproachful plaint of " Early 
 one morning." A jovial-looking man in cor- 
 duroy clothes was tending a brushwood fire ; he 
 had slung a kettle on three sticks, and had set 
 some mugs and plates on a small clean cloth. 
 This struck me as unusual in a tramp's break- 
 fast. He touched his cap and smiled ; he had a 
 comical crooked nose and very white teeth. 
 
 Leaning against the shed was a young woman, 
 a delicate-featured creature, with a black sailor 
 los 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 hat and good plain clothes. She held a child 
 with the colouring of a Murillo St. John' in 
 her arms. He was asleep, wrapped in a soft 
 shawl ; his lashes made a black circle above the 
 exquisite damask bloom of his cheek. I voiced 
 my admiration. She coloured and seemed awk- 
 ward. The man laughed : " Liza, she's my 
 wife, don't like to be caught tramping ; we 
 never slept out before ; but she twisted her 
 foot coming down the hill and we couldn't 
 make the town in time, so we turned in here. 
 No ofFence, lady, I hope ? " " None to me," 
 said I, " and as they are all going reaping the 
 other way to-day, no one need be any the 
 wiser. You were lucky," I said to her, " to 
 have so fine a night so that he couldn't take 
 cold." 
 
 She had a pleasant voice and spoke with some 
 refinement. The man was making tea, and as 
 the boiling water bubbled on the leaves, and the 
 aroma rose out of the brown pot, I clapped my 
 hands involuntarily — I haven't done such a thing 
 for a decade of years — and I said : " If I fetch 
 you some milk will you give me some tea?" 
 And the man laughed genially. He had brown 
 eyes with red gold lights in them, and kind 
 1 06 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 twinkles. I could be fond of that fellow 
 myself. 
 
 I did a good deal of pilfering in the larder, 
 for I went back with cream in a can, and four 
 fresh brown Bramah eggs, and a home-made 
 bread cake and a saucer of jam. I met the man 
 with a fresh face and pearls of water on the end 
 of his crisp curls, for he had been ducking his 
 head in a runlet to the river ; he was carrying 
 the laddie astride on his shoulders. He swung 
 him into the woman's lap ; she smiled shyly and 
 dried the bonny thing's face and hands, and 
 twisted the silken rings of his hair round her 
 fingers. 
 
 " I have brought my own cup," said I, as I 
 laid my contribution on the cloth. I love 
 vagabonds ; I can never see a travelling show 
 without feeling a desire to go behind the scenes 
 and make friends. It does not do to follow 
 the inclination nowadays, for the new genera- 
 tion are seldom anything more than objectionable, 
 low offshoots from London with an eye to 
 gain. This fellow was a character, and the boy 
 might have been a source of pride to an here- 
 ditary prince. 
 
 I haven't enjoyed a morning meal so much 
 107 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 since you and I shared our breakfast up near 
 the Troll seat. Don't think you were not there ; 
 .1 made you have a part in all that was sweet, 
 and good, and human in that odd al fresco 
 meal. The tea was delicious, for I had been 
 right up to the top of the downs and had stood 
 looking down, trying to pick out the seven 
 churches of the seven parishes one can see 
 from there. 
 
 The freshness of the morning matched in 
 some way with the unwonted sense of inner 
 freshness I felt in myself — as if the old joyous 
 youth had been sleeping, not dead as I had 
 thought it — an after-glow of the tender flush of 
 life's jouvence, and the wide-eyed ardent out- 
 look of one's gracious nonnage. Something 
 clean, and wholesome and glad, that was kin to 
 all around me, thrush call, bird note and the 
 opening of bud and bloom. A dewy world, 
 charming as tears of delight in a pair of beautiful 
 eyes. We are with our kind always, and yet 
 it is only at very odd moments, and then always 
 with absolute strangers, that we feel the fibre 
 stir in us of common human relationship, the 
 sense of universal kinship. 
 
 Smile if you will, heart's own, but I did with 
 io8 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 my tinker friend and his woman and boy. He 
 had a dry sense of humour, and I learned all 
 their history. He was left as a baby in a gipsy 
 waggon at a fair. " A ' love child ' I expect," 
 he laughed ; " the saying is they're always the 
 bonniest." He was fairly educated; a farrier 
 with a couple of other trades at his finger-ends. 
 
 They had a house of their own in I , but in 
 
 summer the old need to wander, to get out into 
 the open air grips him. So, as soon as the warm 
 days come, he starts out on a round of knife- 
 grinding and kettle-mending. Liza had been 
 parlourmaid at a rectory but had thrown in her 
 lot, in spite of admonition, with this fascinating 
 son of Nature. I can quite understand Liza ! 
 
 I heard more humorous views of progress, 
 shrewd ideas about men, labour and politics, 
 than I ever heard in an afternoon debate in the 
 " gentleman's talking house," to give the House 
 of Commons its gipsy name. "The missus 
 won't let me go by myself," he said, " but we 
 always sleep comfortably in a village as a rule, 
 and I keep near home so that she can take the 
 train on Saturdays. She's got rare high views 
 for the nipper. He's to be a great man some 
 day. Well, I won't interfere as long as he 
 109 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 turns out something, gives him a charnst to be 
 a man. I can't abide a ' gent ' ; a mechanic with 
 a tall hat Sundays an' a halfpenny cigarette, fair 
 raises my gorge ! " "I expect you're very 
 happy," I said. " Yes, I've never known a 
 day's illness and I carn't recollect ever feelin' 
 miserable, if only the missus were a bit 
 stronger." " I'm better since I have been so 
 much in the open air," she said, " and he never 
 lets me do a hand's turn ! " 
 
 He cleared the things away, and went whistl- 
 ing, with the boy on his shoulders, to take the 
 cart to the lane. Liza's eyes followed them 
 both with a look of supreme content. " He's 
 the best man in the world ! " she said simply. 
 And it seemed to me, dear one, that down in 
 the cities and suburbs, where such momentous 
 social questions have to be decided as to whether 
 the Robinson-Browns may not now include the 
 Smiths on their visiting list, since they have 
 begun to spell their name with a " y " instead 
 of an " i," and have given up selling currants 
 retail, and only take orders en gros — there were 
 a good many things they might learn to advan- 
 tage from my knife-grinding philosopher. 
 
 I sat oh the stile and watched them go down 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the road. He carried the bundles and wheeled 
 the cart with the boy in it ; and, as Liza 
 stooped to detach a straying blackberry spray 
 from the end of her gown, I thought of the 
 flight into Egypt, I suppose because of the old 
 legend that the bramble must crawl ever on the 
 ground because it tore the virgin's robe. Per- 
 haps the thought that came to me with the 
 recollection would be deemed profane ; but 
 these two, this mortal man and woman, no 
 longer two incomplete individuals, but one 
 complete entity, because of the third, begotten 
 and born in love to them, meant tenfold more 
 to me than any Holy Family in legend or 
 picture. Joseph, if one accept the Christian 
 idea, was only a symbol, whereas those three 
 going down the road in the freshness of the • 
 gracious sunlit morning, with the fragrance of 
 hay and odour of bean flowers, to the music of 
 bird and bee, were mortal man and woman and 
 child; the best expression of the best and 
 sweetest in life for humanity. No symbol, but 
 a living possible actuality, within the range of 
 all men's grasp. Will you understand if I say 
 that never were you more intimately near to me 
 than just at that moment ? 
 Ill 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 Can a man understand that to the woman 
 who loves him a new thought may come, a 
 thought not alone of him and of her, but of a 
 thing non-existent, and yet so actual, that it is 
 as if a tiny hand were knocking at the inner- 
 most cell of her heart in a way to make her 
 tremble at the wonder of it ? The thought of 
 this possibility made me all tender ; and I sat 
 there ever so long in the warm sunshine and 
 span dreams. 
 
 I wonder how many childless women go to 
 sleep with a dream child cuddled in the round 
 of their arms? and yet I meet more women 
 every day who shrink from mothering, or who 
 are indifferent to it, if they don't actually dis- 
 like children. Perhaps the terrible object- 
 lesson over-population ofFers has something to 
 do with it — for one cannot but shudder, if one 
 has to pass through poor streets, at the scores 
 of sickly ugly urchins rolling in the gutter, 
 yelling at one another with hideous distorted 
 speech. The stoned prophet of one generation 
 may become the tutelary genius of another ; so 
 perhaps a statue of the apostle of limitation may 
 be erected in the market-place of every town 
 some day. Meanwhile something in me is 
 
 112 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 crooning lullabies, hushing melodies which rock 
 a dream-child in my soul to slumber. 
 
 I am longing for a letter ; it seems ages since 
 you came and talked to me, and yet, measured 
 by days, it is not long. Come soon, heart's 
 own ; I am restless, unhappy without you 1 
 Strangely enough now, perhaps, because of the 
 sober thoughts which temper my wild morning 
 mood. I long for you more even than usual. 
 Take me close to you and say everything sweet 
 and foolish you ever said, over again. I want 
 to hear it — you dear Love ! 
 
 P.S. — I send you my old " Pentameron." I 
 put some loose rose leaves (I remember how 
 you always laughed at my trick of dropping 
 flower petals into my wine) into the chapter I 
 want you to read. The most delightful morn- 
 ing ride I know. How Ser Francesco ambled 
 to Mass in the freshness of spring at Certaldo. 
 See if it gives you as sweet a picture as it did 
 me of that most charming of handmaids, 
 Assunta, tightening the girths, and serving a 
 beaker of sweet white wine as a preliminary ; 
 and of Simplizio, with the hawthorn buds 
 nodding in his green cap, and threatening the 
 
 113 H 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 besdaccia with his blossoming crab switch; 
 dreaming, as well might be forgiven him, of 
 the winsome maid who stayed at home to pre- 
 pare that enviable dish of leveret. 
 
IX 
 
 My very dear and cherished Heart-mate, 
 — What am I to say to your letter ? I read it 
 with smily kind of tears and teary kind of 
 smiles ; I was disposed perhaps by chance — no, 
 never chance between us — to understand it more 
 intimately than I should otherwise have done, 
 for you touch in it on things unexplainable in 
 the ordinary way, the strange rap-port between 
 us two which almost bridges space. I knew it 
 would be waiting to be fetched — you know we 
 get no afternoon delivery. I came down dressed; 
 my landlady said, " The boy has been to the 
 post, and there are no letters." I felt that must 
 be wrong. I said : ' Oh, I will go to town all 
 the same " — something stronger than reasoning, 
 more convincing than the arguments of common 
 sense, the third voice in one beyond all explana- 
 tion, whose promptings never err, whispered 
 insistently : " Go, go all the same." 
 IIS 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 I went through the five-acre wheat field ; a 
 triangle is planted with barley : I was in a 
 strange mood. I wished, as I always wish when 
 I see something that must of its nature be 
 " foreign " to you, that you were with me to 
 see it. The barley, with their heads bent and 
 their beards bristling, looked like a field of 
 waving khaki-coloured shrimps. The wheat 
 held itself proudly erect in the glowing heat ; 
 it made me think of stories of great battles. 
 One after another they came to me, from those 
 told in the grand manner of Homer to the 
 immortal fight of Borrow's tinman. 
 
 Not the least good thing in the future will 
 be the taking down of book as things come 
 back, to make you read the things I love and 
 that have been in a measure formative for me. 
 You wonder always at the wild strain in me 
 which glories in the description of a well-fought 
 fight ; wondered, I remember, when I said that 
 the play of splendid muscle on a man's back as 
 he pits skill against skill is a sight to make one's 
 blood leap. 
 
 Yet you say you love it in me ; I know that. 
 It was at the bottom of all the escapades into 
 which I lured you. You, the gravely trained 
 ii6 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 bureaucrat, who wore your badge of red tape as 
 seriously as if it were the Legion of Honour. 
 There was a touch of mischief to add piquancy 
 to such temptations, for of yourself you would 
 never have dared to suggest the wild drives, 
 and, from your point of view, almost improper 
 escapades into which I beguiled you. You 
 should have seen yourself sometimes. The 
 quaintest thing in the world is to see the boy 
 wake to life in a man of your kind. It was as 
 if you had been under the influence of some 
 evil fairy who had never let the inconsequent 
 laughter of youth have a chance in you. 
 
 I have strayed from my wheat field with its 
 fanciful reminder of battles that are only names, 
 and yet suggest the clash of arms and men at 
 warfare. Whole crowds of names leaped up — 
 Israelites, Amalekites, Christians, and Saracens ; 
 the waving of the compact mass was like the 
 passing of serried ranks of men, legion upon 
 legion. Here and there a tall pennant of oats 
 waved in the breeze, a patch of purple meant a 
 canopy sheltering some fair camp-follower per- 
 haps, and everywhere pools and patches of poppy 
 crimson. 
 
 Somewhere in myself I could hear triumphant 
 117 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 music, rousing strains calling to the fighting 
 instinct, the fibre that quivers in a woman as in 
 a man when trumpets call and men's feet beat to 
 marching time. Perhaps she wouldn't mother 
 soldiers if she lacked it. One's own fancies can 
 make one strangely, rarely glad at times, inde- 
 pendent of all the facts of life, detached in a 
 world of one's own dreams. A world on which 
 no one can hold a patch in mortgage ; for, as 
 you see, all the militant mood in me was only 
 set aflame by the waving of wheaten helmets, 
 for the air around was filled with the monoto- 
 nous churr of the doves " dunting," as the folks 
 up here call it, as they hid in pairs seeking their 
 favourite " dove's-meat," the feathery flowered 
 fumitory. 
 
 I went into the post-office and bought some 
 stamps. The girl said apologetically : " I am 
 sorry, but there was a letter ; I found it after 
 the boy had gone, amongst another bundle." I 
 felt exultantly glad because of this fresh triumph 
 of my inner " feel " against the arguments of 
 common reasoning. I read it sitting on a stile 
 by the roadside, whilst the larks shivered melody 
 above, and the whirr of a distant reaping-machine 
 broke on the air with hard insistence. The old 
 irS 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 swish of scythe was more in tune with Nature's 
 harmonies. Curiously enough, you say in this 
 letter how you love me for my quality of unex- 
 pectedness — the moods which made you never 
 sure of how I would meet you next. And you 
 ask me if I do not wonder at the way you fell 
 in with my maddest proposals, although of your- 
 self lacking in the initiative for such ventures. 
 No, I don't think I have ever wondered once, 
 because anything we two have ever done has 
 always seemed fitting, and natural, and as it 
 should be. 
 
 You recall the night I took you hillwards to 
 see the dawn rise, and tell me of incidents I had 
 forgotten — recall your impressions of me as you 
 saw me, your boyish delight and strange unques- 
 tioning belief in me. I believe you look upon 
 me in the light somewhat of " an adventure." 
 It's good to cast cold caution and convention to 
 the winds at times, to laugh and let one's heart 
 talk, one's spirit be glad, and just live. One 
 can only ^o that when Conscience, Remorse 
 and Co. have no claims to be satisfied on settling- 
 day ; what folks say is a lesser matter. 
 
 I knew I must not give you time for reflec- 
 tion : I can remember quite well how I impressed 
 
 119 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 on the messenger that he was only to give you 
 my note just before the train started. I can 
 recall your start of surprised relief when you 
 saw me waiting with half-anxious dancing eyes 
 at the street corner, for you had a half fear that 
 I was in trouble. And when I said : " Nice 
 thing to come ! The night promises to be 
 lovely, the air is like satin, I am going to drive, 
 will you come and take care of me ? " you 
 got in without a word and leaned back ; you 
 looked tired ; the day had been extra long. 
 
 The streets were full of sauntering people 
 enjoying the leisure of the evening hour, students 
 and cadets in search of adventure, theatre-goers 
 and courting couples. It was not until we had 
 left the city that you noticed we had taken the 
 road mountainwards and that the vehicle was 
 from a livery stable and the horse extra good, 
 as for a distance. " Where are we going, 
 though ?" "To S.," I said, with more assur- 
 ance of manner than my inner trepidation war- 
 ranted. "To S. ?" — and you looked at your 
 watch — " but, little one, we sha'n't be there till 
 eleven ! " "I know," quoth I, " in time for 
 supper ! It's there," pointing to the basket ; 
 and then — you can't think how comically 
 no 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 startled you looked — " We shall change horses 
 and drive up through the magic woods and the 
 mad moonlight ; and we will sit on the Troll 
 seat and see the sun rise ; and when we look 
 down the city will look like a Liliput town in a 
 toy box. They say it's a glorious sight. Then 
 we'll come back and pick up the horses and 
 you'll get to your musty old office with its 
 archives and protocols and fusty treaties in time 
 for your day's work." You shook your head 
 and said, " It's a mad idea, you extraordinary 
 child ! " " It's a glad idea," laughed I, " a long, 
 delicious, silent drive with never a soul but our- 
 selves on the road, just you and I, up, ' over 
 the mountains high ' through the white summer's 
 night, with the night fragrance of the woods, 
 quite diiferent from the odour of day, and a wan 
 moon lady winding silken moon-rays lazily off 
 her silver distaff. You can see the night 
 shadows stealing through the woods already, 
 and the south wind is shepherding the clouds ; 
 he wants to pen them in fold on the other side 
 of that mountain, and his brother from the 
 west is stealing a few, just to tease him ! " 
 
 " There's a big plaid there if you're cold, 
 heart-bird ! " was all you said, and we talked as 
 
 121 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 we always do, never tired of the sameness of 
 the subject ; the wonderful way in ^hlch 
 we two had found one another and our one 
 self. 
 
 And you thought I was just a mad atomy of 
 a woman, but there was something lurking 
 under, for you were standing a test unawares. 
 If you had made one false move, misunderstood 
 me by the breadth of a hair, soiled my white joy 
 by a slightest breath, never in sunlight or 
 moonlight would we two set out again to seek 
 the dawn together, but your eyes met mine 
 always as I wished them to. Once only I knew 
 you disturbed, and your voice grew husky and 
 you drew me close with a sudden passion and 
 said, "Love, oh my dear love, how long do 
 you thipk we two could drive like this .'' " 
 " Until one of us got hungry ! " said I, and the 
 danger was merged in laughter. And we 
 laughed as only children, or a man and woman 
 who have found the missing half, can laugh. 
 And you gave me experiences of your own 
 strange childhood, winter evenings when your 
 mother span by the oven, and told you stories 
 of the were-wolf and the seal-men and the 
 coming of the white reindeer, whilst the actual 
 izz 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 wolves howled not too far from your solitary 
 dwelling. 
 
 Strange, you and I are never conscious of any 
 differences of speech or race. You come to me 
 in your mother-tongue, and I go to you in mine, 
 and I always understand a new word even if I 
 have never seen it before. And when we could 
 see the light of the posting station shining far 
 above us, an eye of gold in the opal setting of 
 the night, ' you asked : " What did you tell 
 them down there ? " " The truth ! that I was 
 going to see the sun rise from the Troll's seat 
 with a friend ! It's a sight, I am told, that no 
 foreigner should miss ! " And you kissed each 
 tip of my fingers and cried that you knew not 
 if I had more of the wisdom of the serpent or 
 guilelessness of the dove ! A woman in love 
 has both, said I, and, moreover, the secret of 
 complete social freedom is to sin against all the 
 conventions — conventionally. 
 
 Do you remember the good woman at the 
 station ? Her wonder at my " foreign ways " ; 
 the madness of wearing silk under a serge gown 
 where no one could see it, only hear its whisper ; 
 the warm big room and the good things in the 
 basket : you were fearfully hungry. 
 
 123 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 On again at midnight under the shadow of 
 the big leather hood, through the wondrous 
 clear white night, when every blossom and leaf 
 has an unfamiliar look in its sleep, a certain 
 motherliness in the way the leaves and sheaths 
 curl and enfold and shelter the coming blossoms. 
 You wanted me to rest with my head on your 
 shoulder, and I said, " No, not to-night, for I am 
 alertly awake, but you shall lean your head 
 against me, and I'll wake you, if you sleep, 
 when we get near the Troll's seat." 
 
 You say you can feel still how I rubbed your 
 forehead and cheek with my chin, and you said 
 it had a hypnotic effect ; perhaps it had, for 
 you slept like a tired child. There is a certain 
 helplessness in the sleep of even the strongest 
 man which appeals to the mother in women. 
 Not a few women absolutely devoid of philo- 
 progenitiveness proper have a mothering quality 
 in their love for man; and I think if you could 
 have known all the rare, wonderful thoughts that 
 grew in me to strength as I held you there, 
 you would not perhaps have rested so easily. 
 
 It was marvellous as one mounted higher 
 and higher up the winding road to look down 
 at times, when the way was narrow, some sheer 
 124 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 declivity and see as it were the clouds huddled 
 in the lower slopes ; and watch the silence and 
 mystery and wonder of a night without gloom, 
 a night of pearl and opal — and yet more won- 
 derful to feel you were sleeping quietly. Then 
 there was a sudden shiver, a strange half quiver — 
 I have often noticed it before the dawn — a little 
 stir in the air, in the leaves, along the herbage ; 
 I have no explanation to offer of it, it is almost 
 as if the new day were yawning gently as it 
 roused from sleep. Then we halted at the foot 
 of the narrow way leading up to the curious 
 throne of grey rock. I awoke you and you 
 stared sleepily, and I said : " Good morning, 
 seven sleeper ! " as I tried to ease my shoulder, 
 and you were all ashamed, penitent, and kissed 
 my hands and asked diffidently — "Didst thou 
 sleep too ? " 
 
 We lose by having the same pronoun for our 
 lover as our lackey ! I shook my head and 
 you asked anxiously — "What did you think, 
 what can you think of me .'' Forgive me 1 I 
 was so tired, dear." And I said : " I thought 
 if I watched very intently I might perhaps see 
 your beard grow, your chin is horrible ! and 
 my foot is asleep 1 " 
 
 I as 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 And then we both laughed and you lifted 
 me out, and I told the driver — I don't believe 
 you even noticed what a droll-eyed, stolid chap 
 he was — to fill the kettle and set the spirit lamp 
 alight and watch till it boiled : he grinned like a 
 pleased boy. 
 
 But you remember, just as well I am sure as 
 I do, how we watched the sun rise in the fresh- 
 ness of the wonderful morning, and heard the 
 birds call as they woke, and saw the squirrels 
 trim their whiskers ; how you knelt and kissed 
 my hands and called me all sorts of mad 
 names — the sun got into your head a little ; and 
 how we washed our faces in the little crystal 
 trickles that were threading an intricate way 
 through stone and moss and undergrowth to 
 their haven in the sea. 
 
 And when I said : wait — and came back with a 
 new clean collar, held it behind my back and 
 gave you three guesses — men are always a little 
 strange to us, most touched by the simple 
 things we do for them, and least moved by our 
 greatest sacrifices — you looked at me with a 
 singular new look in your eyes, laughed more 
 triumphantly, joyously than I ever thought to 
 hear you, and caught me up and held me at the 
 iz6 
 
X\. KJ U JLX XI. i.y± \^ XV V^ U ^ i 
 
 ngth of your arms, and when you lowered me 
 ) kiss me, you had tears in your eyes ; and I 
 :lieve you thought more of the marvellous 
 .ct of my guessing the size of your neck 
 jrrectly, than you did of the wonder and the 
 lory of the coming of the Sun-god with spears 
 id lances and pennants and banners blazoned 
 ith gorgeous colours^ For when I turned to 
 down you called me back and held me 
 oscly and tenderly, with a new touch of 
 jverence in your voice, and you whispered. 
 My dear wife ! " and I don't think you knew 
 ourself that you said it, but I knew what it 
 leant — that you had left the troll beast up 
 lere, and gained a new fibre of spiritual sweet- 
 ess like a little spring of crystal-clear water to 
 eep you healthy inwardly in all good manli- 
 ess ; and the soul in me was listening to a 
 oice singing a magnificat anima mea in there, 
 )r I had set my man's feet in the way I wanted 
 lem to walk — for his salvation and mine. 
 
 Was there ever such a morning meal ? your 
 dive wonder at the resources of an English 
 :a basket, and my manoeuvres to get the driver 
 3 eat his breakfast on the off-side, where the 
 entle morning breezes might waft the too 
 127 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 insistent smell of his caraway speckled cheese 
 away. 
 
 And that wonderful drive back ! Bird's-eye 
 views of the city below developed into greater 
 distinctness at every turn of the road, until the 
 spires of the churches and the tall chimneys of 
 the factories stood out clearly amongst the 
 huddled mass of roofs. 
 
 As a rule the morning is a prosaic common- 
 sense comment on the enthusiastic ventures of 
 the night before, but I have — and mark you, I 
 would have you note this as a virtue — an un- 
 purchaseable attribute in a road-mate down the 
 hill of life — a trick of non-apology, a suspicious 
 distrust of the value of regrets to oneself or 
 any one else. 
 
 It is a foolish thing to coast down a steep 
 hill, or send your motor-car full speed round a 
 corner ; but if you do — because you didn't think, 
 or for the sport of the thing or for any other 
 reason under the stars — don't explain or regret 
 if you smash up at the other end — provided you 
 don't include any one else in the debacle. The 
 folks round will offer gratuitously many much 
 more ingenious explanations of your conduct 
 than could ever occur to you, and be entirely 
 
 128 
 
lisfied with their own astuteness — whereas 
 :y would of a dead certainty suspect anything 
 u might offer as a reason. This holds good 
 nearly every catastrophe, moral or otherwise. 
 ;ver explain ! and it's sheer waste of time to 
 in sackcloth with a dab of ashes on your 
 a,d ! The old-fashioned penitent of that 
 3e did greater credit to church discipline than 
 his own sense of self-respect. Have a cold 
 3 and do better, say I. The old eye for an 
 ;, tooth for a tooth theory was one of 
 ocious stupidity, as is any system of punish- 
 ;nt which hardens or embitters the criminal ; 
 sides being a useless expense to the State, 
 nishment is only of value as far as it redeems. ) 
 le performance of useless penances is not 
 f as salutary as the realisation that one's sin ^ 
 y serve as an experience to work for good, 
 one knows how to draw a lesson for future 
 ; out of it. 
 
 Do you know why I say this to you ? Be- 
 :se from your training you are disposed to 
 isider what folks say too much for your own 
 my happiness. If I had given you the chance 
 I would have marred that perfect morning by 
 •ospective questionings as to the wisdom of 
 129 I 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the gladness of overnight. That is an electro- 
 plated way of enjoying life : it doesn't take 
 much licking to taste the copper. In yourself 
 you are suspicious of it, for you love me for my 
 laughing disdain of the man who makes opinions 
 for the crowd, and the crowds who buy them 
 cheap and ready made. So I made you laugh 
 until your eyes were as clear as the water that 
 was gushing and trickling in a hundred tiny 
 rivulets through the moss on each side of the 
 road, and the riante gaiety of the morning was 
 so infectious that you felt, you said when we 
 reached the outskirts of the city, that you 
 wanted to bid every one a glad good-morrow ! 
 And you got out to wait soberly for the tram- 
 car, and I whispered, in your impossible lan- 
 guage, " May your work be easy ; come as 
 early as you can, for I shall weary for you ! " 
 
 And if you have marked that night, as you 
 say, with a white stone to distinguish it above 
 all others — ah, heart lurer, I have gone one 
 better, for the little white stone I set to remind 
 me of it is streaked with veins of shining gold ! 
 I give you both my hands and my mouth too, 
 if what I see in your eyes pleases me — nay, that 
 was ungenerous : I give them in any case. 
 130 
 
1S.U0A 2\i\lKJlS^KJQn. 
 
 And if you are tired you shall sit and close 
 our eyes, and I'll read. You once said you 
 3uld listen until I stole your senses and you 
 ozed from sheer drowsy pleasure, as if listening 
 } bees humming over some distant clover-field, 
 oth suggesting honied sweetness. I made some 
 erses of that. Your prose makes all my poetry! 
 "here is no prose more ! Life Is a golden book, 
 nd the letters of the poem it holds are magic 
 unes, with colours and fragrance and melody, 
 3 that the reading is everlasting delight, and 
 he subject is eternally old and ever new— just 
 3ve, love, love ! 
 
 131 
 
Dear good little Man, — I wonder why we 
 call the thing that is dear to us little, with 
 entire disregard to its bulk or solid qualities? 
 for in truth your propprtions are considerable. 
 Quaint person of surprising gravity ! You take 
 me much more seriously than I do myself ; but 
 then I have lived so long in my own company 
 that I know the incursions of the gipsy spirit, 
 the imp of the unexpected, the vagaries, the pit- 
 falls the third fellow in there may set for me. 
 
 You ask me some pertinent and inquisitorial 
 questions about things I wrote in my last letter. 
 Of course I did not mean, in saying one should 
 be a law to oneself (that was, I suppose, the gist 
 of what I did say, I can't remember) that one 
 has not to heed certain broad unchartered prin- 
 ciples of right and wrong, based on the well- 
 being of the whole community, principles, by 
 the way, instinctive in ourselves. These one 
 132 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 IS got to stick to. But there is a whole code 
 : morals and manners, mere concessions to 
 )cial expediency, sheer selfish by-laws which 
 le can safely throw overboard, regarding them 
 lerely as ballast, only of use to keep one's ship 
 eady, until one has learnt to take In one's 
 wn special cargo. 
 
 Why should you or I accept any man's ipse 
 Ixit as final ? If he is an authority on some 
 )ecial subject about which you know nothing, 
 3ten to him with respect, because he may be 
 ght ; and, in any case, you don't know enough 
 ) contradict him ; but take no man's opinion 
 n questions of right or wrong for you individu- 
 ly, on subjects of which you have ample oppor- 
 mity in your daily life of framing your own 
 idgment. 
 
 Civil laws, communal laws, indeed laws of all 
 inds founded in other times, when another 
 )irit was dominant, and the spiritual and mate- 
 al needs of men were different, make law too 
 Ften a caricature of equity. The English 
 larriage law, for instance, is based on Canon 
 w, with amplifications in deference to the 
 itailing of property ; is therefore a hardship 
 n a large portion of the community who look 
 133 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 upon marriage purely in the light of a civil 
 contract ; and a still smaller, but intelligent, 
 section who only accept it at all as a means of 
 legitimatising their offspring. You don't believe, 
 and I don't believe, that any legal tie would 
 make a marriage between you and me moral or 
 immoral, f Our love for one another can alone 
 do that. 
 
 This brings me back to the one point upon 
 which I always insist : the necessity of absolute 
 freedom in married life if one is not to stagnate 
 or not to slide backwards. The curse of the 
 whole system is, of course, the fact of making 
 a condition based on mutable feelings subject to 
 immutable laws. I can conceive a situation in 
 which a question of right for you might be 
 wrong for me, and vice versa! and in that case 
 I think each would have to respect the con- 
 viction of the other, and give up opposition. It 
 is possible to think a man a most complete idiot 
 for doing a certain thing, and yet to respect 
 him the more for doing it. The horror of 
 certain marriages is when either the man or the 
 woman vampires the other for some end of his 
 or her own. Always a selfish one ! 
 
 I don't know if you have ever seen a seusi- 
 '34 
 
ive, finely strung man with the fatal spot of 
 weakness in him — for weakness can be a great 
 leal more widespreading in disaster than sin — 
 [oaded into unworthy actions by a wife tuned 
 11 along the line to coarser issues — spurred on 
 )y sheer terror of her railing voice and the 
 mpending domestic " scene " to all sorts of 
 ourses alien to his sense of honour — almost his 
 ense of right ; prepared to do anything, sacrifice 
 nything for a measure of peace. I have. A 
 low moral suicide — the destruction of two 
 ouls, and a frightful example for the eyes and 
 ars of the small issue, ever on the watch for 
 ause and effect. 
 
 One can forgive a good deal if one loves a 
 ;reat deal. That is why love, I take it, must 
 e the keystone of every union — but there is no 
 ;uarantee of love lasting. ) You and I like to 
 elieve that this wonderful something which 
 raws us together is for all time and all eternity; 
 either of us could swear to that, dear,, and 
 ecause I know that I insist always, as, indeed, 
 ou do in even fuller measure, on each of us 
 eeping our individual freedom. You can be 
 o law for me, nor I for you — what is right for 
 ou, you must do even at the cost of pain to me. 
 i:3S 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 You asked me if I thought it would do for 
 every one to think so individually. Yes, if they 
 are advanced enough to do it, and prepared to 
 pay the cost. You don't suppose I imagine 
 every man is equal .'' "All men are equal in the 
 sight of God " has always struck me as one of 
 those shibboleths that are an insult to the 
 Omniscient — unless we take it in the sense that 
 to get to the root of all things is to discover the 
 absolute relativity of good and evil, and the 
 awesome idea that if you delve deep enough 
 the conviction must arise that white and black 
 are the same thing, only the action of the light 
 is different. 
 
 I don't think our Hooligan is much above 
 the level of a human hog, and he is a long way 
 below the level of an intelligent dog with un- 
 spoiled natural laws to govern his (moral.'') 
 instincts. I am as far from believing that as I 
 am from believing that every woman I meet is 
 as intelligent as I am myself, or from thinking 
 you of a piece with any chance man in the 
 street. 
 
 I owe no man nor woman any respect for] 
 accidents of birth and position ; I bend my 
 head in no homage other than to the great 
 136 
 
Avvy u iT. n. rv± vy x\. vy i3 n. 
 
 rtist, who is the only genuine aristocrat, 
 ecause his congenital gift is unpurchasable, 
 nd not to him if he debases it for any sordid 
 eason; or to the individual who has fought 
 is way to a complete realisation of the best in 
 imself. I am not a little bit humble, dear 
 3ve. I would not change with any one who 
 ver lived or lives. I have gained more enter- 
 iinment, in a more chequered existence than 
 ou yet know of, in watching the efforts of 
 oiks to impress me with themselves or their 
 elongings. I can explain best what I mean if 
 
 say that I would have gladly bent a knee to 
 ur late Cardinal Manning when a genuflection 
 3 the Papal toe would be a sheer impossibility, 
 lecause, in the one instance, I would, from my 
 ;nowledge of the facts of his life, have elected 
 ^e man saint b^ my own suffrage ; in the other 
 
 would be bowing merely to the elected one of 
 ther men's suffrages, men of whose fitting 
 ualification for the position of electors I have 
 o means of ascertaining, therefore my homage 
 rould be perfunctory — a dishonesty to my 
 iner sense of honesty. 
 
 I could never be loyal to a king merely be^ 
 luse he was king. I could die for him if he 
 137 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 were an honest king, working hard for his 
 salary, and the representative of the principles 
 of government I chose myself to adhere to : 
 the loyal servant, in fact, of me and my fellows. 
 But I could serve a cobbler equally, were he 
 chosen worthily to sit on the throne as the 
 head-piece of the state machinery. I am 
 entirely lacking in sympathy for dethroned 
 monarchs, whose subjects have thought fit to 
 dethrone them — as monarchs ; though I could 
 give them all my sympathy as persons unfortu- 
 nate enough to forfeit their position in life — in 
 the same way as I could feel sorry for a laun- 
 dress if her landlord were to seize her mangle. 
 
 I have stood in a crowd often, and tried to 
 see if I felt any thrill at the passing of royalty, 
 but an honest analysis always resulted in the 
 knowledge that, given flags, music, and shout- 
 ing people, the thrill that a common enthusiasm 
 sends to every individual in a crowd, one might 
 feel the same if the carriage were empty and 
 royalty only an abstraction. 
 
 I must send this if you are to get it the 
 
 usual day, and I love better to think you will 
 
 be glad to have it than make it more precious 
 
 to you by delay, and I lay aside all arguments, 
 
 138 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 and just say, Love me, love me as I do you, for 
 that is the most essential thing in the world for 
 me. Being a woman, just the way my chosen 
 man loves me is of more importance than what 
 all the great men of the earth are saying sagely 
 in the cabinet councils. I love you, be sure of 
 that — tenderly, truly, dearly, proudly, humbly, 
 as sweetheart, Wife, mother, and friend, in all 
 the sweetest ways of loving. 
 
 '39 
 
XI 
 
 You DEAR GOOD Man Thing, — How nicc ot 
 you to send me those books ! I promise myselt 
 a delightful evening. ( I always tear the heart 
 out of a book first, Ithen go back and read it all 
 over again and dwell on it in places. Books 
 are like friends : when one is young one loves 
 them so ardently, seeks them with ever new 
 eagerness, but as one gets older and more 
 " detached " and more disillusioned, they be- 
 come more and more what friends become : 
 conserves on the world's bread — but never 
 bread itself; that one has to bake for oneself 
 out of wheat of one's own growing. One has 
 backed too many of friendship's bills not to 
 realise that there, too, one has to pay one's "shot " 
 and one is lucky if one has kept one soul to 
 share one's books and one's fireside. A sting of 
 rheumatism reminds one that one's Alp-soaring 
 
 ventures are best undertaken from an armchair. 
 14.0 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 In early days books were the "open sesame" to 
 realms of adventure, and one always played the 
 part of hero or heroine in aU one's wanderings. 
 But as age creeps on one grows sceptical of 
 Romances, having seen the reverse of the medal 
 of too many ventures. One's critical faculty 
 displaces one's ardent fancy — and so one becomes 
 more and more an interested spectator. Perhaps 
 this explains why one likes memoirs and letters, 
 the actual record of actual lives and events — 
 except when one becomes really a child again 
 and lets oneself run the whole length of fancy's 
 chain into lands of fairy lore. You have the 
 right instinct about books. You are able to 
 divide them into literature and those which are 
 merely books. 
 
 I can look back with delight to books I read 
 as a child-girl, and can remember how I used to 
 save up to buy some especially coveted volume. 
 Strange to think how you, too, an ugly little 
 laddie misunderstood as you fancied, were con- 
 ning stolen books in your land of eternal snows, 
 to meet me some day at the point of the angle. 
 
 I can recall a wonderful weekly boy's paper 
 with' fine rough illustrations ; they were drawn 
 by a marvellous artist in moments of semi- 
 141 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 sobriety and were worth a hundred modern 
 photogravures ; for if one cared to see how it 
 was done — I did in those days — one could see the 
 soul and the intention of this individual draughts- 
 man at the back of each penstroke. I used to 
 stop under lamp-posts all the way home and 
 snatch golden moments in the progress of these 
 marvellous tales of adventure. Jack in the tale 
 was a slender, exquisite, golden-haired stripling, 
 like the leading lady in my first pantomime in 
 the old Theatre Royal. A German fairy tale 
 appeared each week, too, with the delightful 
 and quaint original woodcuts. 
 
 Your reading was strange for a lad, little of 
 adventure or fairy tale, the sombre introspective 
 heart studies of your own wonderful writers. 
 You must teach me to read TurgeniefF and all 
 the others. I will find out for myself, as I 
 always do, those who have escaped advertisement ; 
 but whose lays are none the less good to listen 
 to, when they echo one's own heart whispers 
 with a new note of joy or sorrow in the intona- 
 tion. 
 
 It is rather wonderful that you know so 
 many of our best writers, not in the least 
 wonderful that they are more or less old — 
 142 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 mostly dead. But you must not ask me to 
 send you modern novels that deal with the 
 actual facts of English life and which will give you 
 a faithful concrete picture of the great cosmopo- 
 litan drama as played in our " little village " 
 every day. No publisher would accept a vera- 
 cious study of any phase of the life of, perhaps, 
 the wickedest, most complex city of any time. 
 
 You will ask me what has the publisher to do 
 with the writing of books ? Surely he is only 
 or ought only to be the middleman between 
 author and public — that the writer ought to be 
 the judge of what to write and how to write it. 
 You lose sight of the fact that in England 
 everything is run, even law and religion, on 
 trade principles. Book writing is in itself a 
 trade rather than a vocation if the writer has to 
 live by his output. The publisher is forced to 
 be a tradesman, however cultured a gentleman 
 he may be in private life. For instance, if a 
 client afflicted with an artistic conscience come 
 to him about a pre-arranged book and says 
 pitifully : " It is not working out quite as we 
 discussed it, it is running away with me ! " 
 he will be forced in the interest of his business 
 to reply : " That is a fact I do not recognise 
 H3 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 between the hours of 9 and 6." And he may 
 on reading the MS. return it, saying : " I like 
 it, like it immensely, but I will not publish it. 
 Write a long book, at least 100,000 words, which 
 I can sell at six shillings, and I will accept it at 
 once." 
 
 Length and price are factors in bookmaking, 
 though in themselves, as you know, beside the 
 question of quality. His traveller goes round 
 periodically with samples of coming lines of 
 book goods to tout for orders from the country 
 booksellers. These may be quite ignorant men, 
 but they are knowing caterers for the great un- 
 lettered British public, who never have learned, 
 and probably never will learn that bookmaking 
 and literature are not the same thing. Then, 
 again, he has to study the prejudices of the 
 bookstall monopolist and the wants of the 
 lending libraries. Every Nonconformist ves- 
 tryman with a municipal vote can set himself 
 up as a judge of what is proper reading for the 
 intelligence of his district. The newspapers 
 and journals are not entirely free to say what 
 they think in the matter either, for publishers' 
 advertisements play a part in their revenue and 
 free copies for review are cheaply got, are 
 144 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 " stuff" to fill up the ever-growing size of their 
 ventures. The subscribers to the newspapers 
 regulate the fictional freedom of the Press : 
 expediency is the Lex Heinze of every branch 
 of life in England. 
 
 Neither Literature nor Art is a component 
 part of the life of the people here. The great 
 bulk of the moneyed middle class do not look 
 upon them as in any measure necessary to finer 
 living; and if they have any books in their 
 houses, they will either be well-bound editions 
 of such authors as have become classics by the 
 suffrage of time, and which they have never 
 read or probably forgotten ; or such books as 
 are in vogue in Mudie's, or are having a boom 
 in the papers. Of one thing you can be sure in 
 such a house — no book will be judged on its 
 merits as a work of art. 
 
 I have heard a foreigner ask with surprise 
 how, with such ingrained indifference to the 
 significance of books as a formative element in 
 life, one can find pictures, and good pictures, 
 and a worthy bit of bronze or engraving in the 
 mansions of the middle class, where there is 
 otherwise a total lack of culture. This is ex- 
 plainable : in buying pictures, preferably those of 
 145 K 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 men whose works have a rising value, they are 
 investing in a species of " real estate." They 
 have also learnt by tradition, by rote, as it were, 
 to know a little of what is good in a picture. 
 Their grandfathers, when the grand tour was a 
 part of every gentleman's education, went to 
 Italy and got a veneer of the right instinct. 
 
 Besides, in the matter of pictures one can 
 give an equivalent for an expert's opinion. The 
 cultivated Hebrew element which has inter- 
 veined every grade of society in England has 
 done not a little towards the appreciation of 
 painting and music. With literature it is dif- 
 ferent ; there individual taste and an inherent 
 and cultivated discrimination is necessary. A 
 library is more often one of the " correct things" 
 to have, than a living voice in the house' of life, 
 a gracious assembly of the shades of the departed 
 mellowed to intercourse by the passage of time. 
 
 I have often looked with new interest at some 
 fascinating society woman, who had only struck 
 me as the beautiful shell of a soulless entity, 
 when I have seen her collection of books in her 
 special room. Beautiful editions of beautiful 
 books, first editions and autograph volumes, 
 and others specially bound with her own device 
 146 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 on the cover. Disillusion followed speedily. 
 The remark, that books covered in white vellum 
 or samite, which one must not handle for fear of 
 sullying, were as companionless to me as an 
 assembly of satin-clad waxworks, and that a 
 book with its leaves uncut left me with the 
 same sense of aloofness as the company of a 
 deaf and dumb person, brought out the truth. 
 
 The gift of a book is always enhanced 
 for me when the giver severs the pages, and 
 offers it to me with its heart bared for perusal. 
 How well you know me ! Even in this little 
 thing you guessed my liking ; I would have 
 caressed your dear understanding head for that, 
 had you been near. The uncut pages always 
 irritate me. Have you ever talked with a friend 
 through a prison grating ? You can only touch 
 a finger through the intervening wires — that is 
 how they affect me. 
 
 To return to lovely madam. A few adroit 
 questions will, in nine cases out of ten, unmask 
 her as an impostor. Her books have no influ- 
 ence on her heart or soul, are neither formative 
 for good, nor restrictive for evil, nor cultivators 
 of beauty or truth. They have neither broad- 
 ened her tolerance, widened her sympathies, nor 
 147 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 helped her one step on the road to better self- 
 hood. They are just adjuncts to herself, 
 trappings to enhance her fancied value as a 
 fascinating personality; just as the bizarrely 
 shaved monogram on her poodle's loins, or 
 her paragraphed partiality for pierced diamonds 
 or sugared violets. 
 
 The best-paid writing man perhaps we have 
 here in England never earned his fame by his 
 worthiest books. If you name to his admirers 
 a few of his subtlest, tenderest, greatest short 
 stories, ask them if they know a wonderful bit 
 of work in which art and humanity shake hands 
 in the tale of two folks called Gadsby, they will 
 shake their. heads. For he won his title as 
 Imperial Chanticleer, because he crowed oppor- 
 tunely and expediently in ballads, at a moment 
 when the nation was dozing and the Little 
 Englander was stealing a march ! This has 
 another explanation, too. 
 
 You must not make the common mistake of 
 the foreigner in considering England merely as 
 a nation of grocers, of territorial aggressors and 
 commercial buccaneers. Don't lose out of sight 
 that amongst all modern nations she has been 
 the cradle-land to the greatest and most varied 
 14S 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 poetry. From Chaucer to Swinburne there has 
 always been a singer for a soldier, a rhymester 
 for a huckster. They are profound sentimen- 
 talists ! 
 
 One of the most singular features of this 
 truly extraordinary people is their almost mono- 
 maniacal dislike to face facts. They have a 
 fanatical objection to realise unpleasant truths. 
 They will accept a recital of facts in verse which 
 they would burn publicly if issued in prose. It 
 is a species of moral cowardice, entirely unex- 
 plainable ! It permeates every department in 
 life from the House of Commons to the hos- 
 pital dispensary. An astute finance minister 
 will never spring the sum total of any bill to be 
 footed by the taxpayers on the nation at once ; 
 he knows the national idiosyncrasy too well ; he 
 merely tacks on a supplementary estimate ; just 
 as the doctor never says cancer — tumour is 
 vaguer and less alarming. 1 am not jesting ; 
 this meets one at every turn. If by any trickery 
 of translation Alving's mental decay could have 
 been made to spring from, let us say, dropsy 
 rather than the disease it did ; there would never 
 have' been any objection to the production of 
 
 Ibsen's ghosts. 
 
 149 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 There are good books, delightful books, pub- 
 lished now and then, but you are quite right 
 in saying you do not find them amongst the 
 30,000-edition writers you name to me, and 
 which your booksellers show in their windows 
 because their agent naturally sends them what- 
 ever is " going " best. Scrapment literature is 
 the order of the day here ; magazines multiply 
 on magazines ; photographic illustrations, and 
 second, if not third-rate reading matter ; cheap- 
 ness and mediocrity are the dominant notes. I 
 have rarely, very rarely met any lower middle- 
 class man who had any real acquaintance with 
 literature or real love of books as things of value 
 in life. Abroad I have. I remember once 
 having to stay at a poky hotel in Rhineland 
 for two days. Remind me to tell you that 
 adventure some day. Indeed, we shall not be 
 dull for want of matter ; I have as many tales 
 as the Princess Scherazade, and I promise you 
 I will soften the painfid and tone down the 
 harsh points, and silver-gild them with the 
 humour which lurks everywhere if one seek 
 for it ; because I have seen that tender heart of 
 yours show its sensitiveness to suffering all too 
 plainly. 
 
 ISO 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 Well, to go back. It poured with rain ; one 
 window of the long bare room looked down a 
 straight road with skeleton trees on each side 
 running into a leaden horizon, the other into a 
 clay-bedded garden with ragged shrubs and 
 forlorn-looking iron tables in front of a wire 
 arbour with the skeleton of some summer 
 climbing plant crawling over it like a tangle of 
 desiccated snakes. 
 
 In desperation I began to talk to the waiter. 
 He knew every book I knew in his own tongue, 
 and many I did not. He brought me a 
 beautiful edition of Heine and two books of 
 his own favourite writer, a South German 
 Jeffries, who wrote exquisite studies of life and 
 love in the Austrian Tyrol : his name I have 
 forgotten, and his books I have never seen 
 since. He begged to be permitted to make 
 the gnddiges Frdulein comfortable. So he 
 closed the shutters, filled the stove with fire- 
 wood, put a footstool under my feet, and lent 
 me not alone his books, but his reading lamp. 
 I gave him, when I left, the only book I had in 
 my bag, a little leather-bound early Keats, and 
 it was eminently characteristic of his nation, I 
 thought, that he accepted it and a tip with the 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 same serene, pleasant Danke schbn ! Mind 
 you, I don't think reading as you do is quite 
 good for you. You live too much in your 
 spare time with your books, and too little with 
 human beings. It is not altogether well for 
 you. Reading can become — I have known 
 victims — an insidious disease leading to mental 
 paralysis. Sometimes I think it is the Nemesis 
 of the dead writers. 
 
 Best of lovers, you who are my book-marker, 
 pointing to the most golden pages in my special 
 volume of life, I have not written one kind, 
 tender line in all this tiresome letter. The day 
 had a little to do with it ; it has been mild, not 
 to say muggy and grey, but to-day there is a 
 nip of frost, pleasant as the slight taste of salt 
 frosting on almonds, and it has cleared my 
 head, given me a tonic feeling. You know 
 such moods of mine, for have you not said to 
 me : " You are aloof, my elf, spinning reason- 
 ings. You do not need my caresses : I must 
 wait tvith patience until you tire and come back 
 to me 1 " 
 
 One mistake you make, dear heart ! I am 
 never away from you. To know you near is 
 pleasure, even though, as you say, I sometimes 
 152 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 like to be to myself for hours at a time. Yet be 
 sure, entirely sure, that if each fresh day is a 
 new page in my manual of life, your name and 
 the thought of you, and the desire for you, runs 
 as a purple and gold thread between each newly 
 written line. I would like to sit quietly near 
 you this evening, and be silent or let you talk 
 to me, for you have a marvellous and delightful 
 and deliciously flattering way of introducing 
 me, however foreign I may be to the subject of 
 discourse ; like the lozenges and devices of 
 exotic nature with which the old monks used 
 to beautify their offices. 
 
 I can smile, oh so tenderly, when I think of 
 how you made me figure in serious talks of 
 Russo-Finn policy, commercial expansion, and 
 possible openings for a young man of keen 
 vision in Siberia. The very inflections you 
 gave to the utterance of my name, when you 
 paused to see if I were listening, and not off" on 
 a broomstick ride cloudwards to chase some 
 elusive fancy of my own ; were scrolls and 
 intricacies and marvellous dottings of gold and 
 silver and gem work in the sober text. Well, 
 the whole book is yours ! What troubled you, 
 heart mine .'' Your last letter was short, and had 
 IS3 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 a restless note in it. May I not know, love, 
 not out of curiosity, but because I might 
 help? 
 
 P.S. — I come back. Stand quite still, and I 
 will caress you in my own way. You have just 
 the dearest chin in all the world. 
 
 IJ4 
 
XII 
 
 My VERY, VERY, VERY DEAREST ! MY GOLDEN- 
 
 TONGUED LITTLE Man, — You ask me SO many 
 questions, you give me no space to tell the beads 
 of my rosary of love to you ! I suppose it is 
 natural that you want to hear what I think, and 
 why I think it, for, indeed, as you say when 
 together we are only conscious of one thing : 
 our wonderful love,lthe dancing threads of light 
 running from soul to soul,) the rare delicate 
 feeling of complete well-being, of restful content 
 in one another's nearness ; the strange, never- 
 to-be-forgotten marvel of having found and 
 being found, so that the problem of ourselves 
 dwarfs all the facts of life into insignificance; 
 so that even our actual every-day selves and 
 our ideas and opinions never appear in the 
 foreground. And when we think over the 
 hours we were together, we realise that we 
 had never once got beyond the theme of our- 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 selves and our love and our content at being 
 together. 
 
 You ask, referring to my last letter, why I 
 thought you read too much, why I consider that 
 reading may become a vice. It is always diffi- 
 cult to take up the threads of any argument 
 where one has left off ; there is a change in the 
 venue of one's thoughts, as it were ; and I 
 want to talk of quite other things, to say how 
 pleased I was when you said that the soul of 
 me, the delight of prisoning my wayward spirit 
 when it flitted to you in passing was not enough, 
 but that you desired the hands and hair and 
 throat of me, that you could not do without a 
 single remembered scrap of me, and you remem- 
 bered everything, even to the little mole under 
 ■my left ear. By the way, I cricked my neck 
 trying to discover it. Nice thing ! You are 
 an ideal lover, for you " say things " ! Do you 
 know a woman doesn't value the deepest, most 
 unselfish love if it is silent. The man who tells 
 her why she is just the sweetest thing in the 
 world to him, even if the biggest part of his love 
 is in the telling, holds the key to her favours ; 
 where a Titan silent in a sea of perpetual sacrifice 
 and devotion merely bores her and sends her 
 156 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 fancy flitting to the possibility of having the 
 things she desires to hear voiced by some one 
 else. She has a weakness for love by word of 
 mouth. 
 
 One of the reasons why marriage is so often 
 as dvJl reading as a last year's calendar is 
 because man won't see the necessity of constantly 
 renewing the dates. Were he wise, he would 
 do it as a matter of policy. There's not much 
 satisfaction in wearing a new frock in the back 
 garden of a blind asylum. You see I have a 
 fair share of all kinds of weakness, my little 
 golden-tongued Chrysostom ! with your knack 
 of making one feel precious from the curl on 
 one's forehead to the buckle of one's shoe. 
 Practically that is the secret of happiness ; to 
 anoint one's eyes with fairy dew and see all. 
 realities through fanciful spectacles. 
 
 I am talking of myself again, and you would 
 have me talk of you. Well, it was in this way 
 I meant it. To a man of your temperament — 
 actively indolent, if I may so call it, for you 
 really only labour to procure yourself an hour 
 of supineness ; introspective, strongly receptive, 
 lacking in initiative because you are always more 
 inclined to play the spectator than fill a role in 
 157 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the drama — it may easily happen that all your 
 enthusiasms, all your impulses will dry-rot, as 
 you will never act on them. 
 
 Reading fosters your idiosyncrasies ; whilst 
 you can lose yourself in the contemplation of 
 the great upheavals in history, watch the struggles 
 of the world's great men, conjure up visions of 
 the world's fairest women, controvert, analyse 
 and rearrange events in accordance with your 
 own conception of them, without the trouble of 
 even taking your pipe out of your mouth ; you 
 will never be up and doing, from a desire to 
 work, not merely from a sense of duty. 
 
 It becomes more and more difficult, in a world 
 where Hustle is the password, for any one to 
 lead an absolutely contemplative life. To make 
 one's mark even faintly, initiative and action are 
 necessary. In spite of co-operation and Trades 
 Unions and Syndicates for everything under the 
 sun, there has perhaps never been a time when 
 individual initiative or personality has a greater 
 chance of making itself felt. It is in our day 
 that one can see the strange spectacle of one 
 man, a mere commoner, hoodwinking the legis- 
 lators of a nation and leading a great people by 
 the nose ; hurling them from a state of un- 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 paralleled prosperity into a vortex of uncertainty, 
 into war, taxation and international difficulties. 
 In the inexorable usury of time one has to pay 
 for all one's mistakes with compound interest. 
 
 The balance of power has never been in the 
 hands of the people, never will be : it lies in the 
 man who tips jthe scales — and some one always 
 tips the scales. Even those who have pleaded 
 most strenuously in the latter half of the mori- 
 bund century for socialism and communism, 
 are beginning to realise that all socialism founded 
 on an idea of equality is a mere fata morgana — 
 that the ideal socialism can never be reached 
 except through individualism ; that the more 
 absolutely individual, ay, even egoistic, in 
 principle a man is, the less dependent on his 
 fellows, the more able to hoe his own row, the 
 more nearly does he approach the ideal unit of 
 a socialistic community. 
 
 Absolute equality there never will be as long 
 as the beggar in a ditch may beget a strong man 
 with ideals, a man-mover who can sway the 
 destinies of his fellow men by a stirring ballad, 
 a gleaming sword or some strenuous appeal to 
 the religious instinct in all men's souls, or if he 
 be a schemer by appeals to their self-interest ; 
 159 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 and the duke with a flawless pedigree father an 
 inanity, whose living or dying is of no more 
 moment to the bulk of humanity than the rot- 
 ting of one pea in a crop of fifty acres. The 
 greater the number of individuals in a state 
 who can think, act and get a decent living in 
 accordance with their individual demands on 
 life ; the more nearly will that state reach the 
 ideal of the best socialism. 
 
 You cannot afford to let reading become a 
 vice with you, an insidious disease, wasting your 
 energies. The brain mildews quickly from dis- 
 use. I say a disease, for I have known many 
 victims. Every country town with a lending 
 library has women patients. They pay a penny 
 a volume, and read steadily through book after 
 book. They never have any clear idea of any 
 book, any writer's style or any thinker's aim. 
 They have sometimes, when the reading habit 
 has grown on them, to choose a more solid book 
 because no other happens to be in. They mix 
 up the characters and the plots in the most 
 amazing manner, and if you are malicious 
 enough to cross-question them with a seemingly 
 casual interest ; they will fail to see why you find 
 anything humorous in the assumption that Mr. 
 160 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 Causabon was the man with the leg in the 
 Egoist, or that Oakhurst was not the family 
 name of the gentleman called John by Miss 
 Charlotte Young. 
 
 I am quite proud of you for being able to 
 read Meredith ; you are rather wonderful in a 
 way. I remember your amazement, when you 
 confessed to me that the front page of " Richard 
 Feverel " was beyond your understanding, at 
 my reply : " So it is of mine ! you can't read 
 Meredith and parse him ; you've got to read 
 him as you do a book in a foreign language, by 
 flash-lights of intuition ! " 
 
 Reading to these women I speak of becomes 
 a sort of daily drug, and gradually takes the 
 place of exercise, household duties, indeed active 
 interests of any kind ; until their will becomes 
 paralysed by disuse, their judgment fuddled, 
 and their whole mentality a mere sieve for the 
 sifting through of indiscriminate reading matter ; 
 of which not a grain remains behind to take 
 root and be perhaps the germ of some inde- 
 pendent idea or individual opinion. 
 
 You will not thank me for cataloguing you 
 with this class of book bibbers, and I do not 
 actually, only relatively. I have to cry 'ware 
 
 l6l L 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 dictionaries ! they are my form of the danger ; 
 glossaries are absolutely infectious. The peasant 
 words (do you remember how we used to try 
 and find exact equivalents?) always give the 
 moods of their own nature more intimately 
 than any of the accepted dictionary terms. In 
 Buckinghamshire here they say so prettily to go 
 flowering, wooding, and bluebelling ; and the 
 other day, when I gave a little lad with violet- 
 grey eyes — because, oh foolish me ! because 
 they reminded me of yours ! — a penny, his 
 mother said : " There, thank the lady. Tommy, 
 for giving you a penny to buy ' palates.' " 
 Funny, isn't it, they call any kind of sweet a 
 " palate " .'' Yours, I fancy, masquerade in the 
 guise of metaphysics and disquisitions on systems 
 of philosophy. 
 
 All roads lead to Rome ! But, as your 
 career lies in another direction, I cannot but see 
 with some alarm your tendency to let time run 
 by, whilst you watch life from a coign of van- 
 tage in an armchair with a book. In thirty 
 years hence, yes, but not now. You know how 
 anxious I am for you to be yourself and entirely 
 yourself, how loth I am to interfere with your 
 individuality, but in this case I speak because 
 
 162 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 you yourself ask me to tell you why I thought 
 there lurked a danger for you. You have many 
 qualities to make a man of mark, but inter- 
 woven in the very warp of your soul is a mystic 
 black thread leading to gloomy places, where 
 dark spectres lay wait for you, and drag you 
 into pessimistic brooding. Some forbear was 
 answerable for it, I suppose ; perhaps the great 
 grandmother who spent her girlhood amid the 
 horrors of famine and pestilence and serfdom, 
 and carried the tragedy of it in her face ever 
 afterwards. 
 
 I believe there is something in me, in the 
 touch of lightsome dare-devilry that is ever 
 ready to dart out, even in my gravest moments ; 
 in my fearless curiosity, and not a little philo- 
 sophy of a vagabond sort, which is a set-ofF 
 against this strain in you. I always know when 
 the shadow of it is stealing over you, and up to 
 this when I have been with you I have been able 
 to chase it away ! 
 
 Do you recollect once I went to look for 
 you, and found you sitting with your hands 
 thrust deep in your pockets ? You looked up 
 as I came in, but never stirred, and I framed 
 your face in my hands and forced your eyes to 
 
 163 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 meet mine, and gazed at you steadily. You 
 said afterwards that a smile grew in my eyes, 
 and played about my mouth, and worked into 
 your very blood, so that you felt warm and 
 glad all at o'nce, as if you had suddenly come 
 out of some cold damp place into glowing sun- 
 shine, with a vital, tonic quality in every ray. 
 You could not know the strange exultant joy 
 which the sense of my own power gave me, 
 as I watched the light answer in your eyes, 
 and the boyish, almost naive, relief grow in 
 them. 
 
 And I wiled you to take me to a farce in the 
 winter gardens. You remember how we 
 laughed, and how we laughed at our simple 
 supper afterwards, and even when we said good- 
 night ; you came back to embrace me again, 
 because the bubbling laughter in us both had 
 made it seem less sweetly serious a ceremony 
 than usual ; for we have neither of us, I think, 
 ever got over the wonder, almost awe, which 
 the consciousness that more than our lips meet 
 gives us, the feeling that it is as if something in 
 our senses is listening for the meeting, the 
 mating of some iRner spirit selves, which be- 
 come one in such moments as that. I woke 
 164 * 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 hours afterwards, and broke the quiet of my 
 room with a ripple of merriment. I wondered 
 if you were smiling in your sleep, and I turned 
 my lips to where I always like to think of your 
 dear head resting. 
 
 I wonder have I said one thing in all this 
 incoherent letter to explain why I want you to 
 go out more, to mix with laughing youth, to 
 catch joy from smiling eyes, to snatch a tune 
 from lilting lips. I believe in a dose of frivolity 
 at times to leaven the seriousness of modern 
 life. A good musical comedy plays the part of 
 a feather broom in a cobwebby library fuU of 
 serious tomes. It scatters the dust, and makes 
 the title to all kinds of subjects clear. 
 
 I remember once when very young being 
 shocked at the saying of a wise old man, that a 
 measure of gentlemanly debauch was good for 
 a man's soul. I think now he was right ; 
 indeed, if one knows anything of the horrible 
 imaginings of mediaeval monkish literature, one 
 cannot but think they would have been cleaner 
 and better, committing themselves in all honesty 
 to what some one calls " le huitieme peche 
 capitde" woman. You can't measure your 
 own strength nor weakness until you test it on 
 165 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 your fellow men — and women. Now that is 
 generous of me ! 
 
 It is curious when one considers how impor- 
 tant an educative part men and women play in 
 each other's lives at all stages of their develop- 
 ment, how opposed most husbands and wives 
 are, as a rule, to allow each other a degree of 
 freedom in their friendships. 
 
 I believe you are a jealous little creature. I 
 hope you will have self-respect enough never to 
 let me see when you are. You are all the 
 world, just all the whole world to me as the 
 stadtholder of my heart and destiny, but you 
 are not all the world in intelligence and expe- 
 rience, and as a buffoon you are below con- 
 sideration. I trust you will take a nice, non- 
 emotional interest in many charming women, 
 for I am tremendously interested in a comfort- 
 able, unemotional kind of way in any number of 
 men. You must not curl up in yourself again. 
 I can feel it in your letters. I know if I were 
 near I could rouse you, but I want you to be 
 independent of me — because, just because I 
 love you as I do. I kiss your dear eyes, and I 
 wait for your answering caress, you love of the 
 world, you maker of my heart's music ! 
 1 66 
 
XIII 
 
 In Bed. 
 
 "A GOOD Sunday to my dear Mistress ! " It 
 sounded so quaintly, sweetly old-fashioned ! It 
 cannot but be a good day when I have your 
 dear words to read. I am ill, dear ; but do not 
 worry, I shall get all right ; I wired because I 
 knew you would be anxious at not hearing as 
 usual. All my nerves are vibrating like the 
 tuning-up of an orchestra — scraping, screeching, 
 without knowing to what all the noise is to be 
 a prelude. It promises to be the overture to 
 an Inferno. When it is like this with me the 
 pain becomes audible, as it were, and has colour 
 — a purplish-yeUow colour, I always fancy. It 
 would be rather like the loops of electric light 
 in a globe, if they had sound as well as light 
 and quiverment. By the time you get this I 
 ho^ I shall be better. 
 
 I want you to have this on your name-day, 
 167 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 although I am afraid my head will not echo my 
 heart-wishes in the way I desire, for it is all 
 occupied in listening to the devil-dance in my 
 back. There was a thunderstorm last night ; 
 I lay awake and listened. Thor was casting 
 thunderbolts ; the crown of a great tree near 
 the house crashed down. There is a madly 
 exhilarating quality in a storm like that, although 
 something, electricity, I suppose, in the atmo- 
 sphere always gives me pins and needles, and 
 if I have any nerve-pain, intensifies it. The 
 wind howled and rushed and swept the earth, 
 and converted the corner of the world about me 
 into a huge sounding-board, evoking all the 
 echoes in the world, mighty voices calling out 
 of the darkness, spirits of desolation with the 
 laughter of furies. 
 
 I could hear bells — where do they come from, 
 the bells and voices in the storm-chants .'' They 
 were like the tolling of buoy-bells at sea, calling 
 up visions of sinking ships ; irregular, despair- 
 ing knells and chanting wind-voices, intoning 
 misereres ; tortured wails, the heart-cries of the 
 world's harlots condemned to solitude by the 
 world's virtuous ; the bass notes of men's voices 
 pleading in remorse for assoilziement ; the shrill 
 i68 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 sobs of deserted babies — and through it all \ 
 steady downpour of rain. Sudden gusts that 
 ripped the air as the tearing of giant sails, then 
 a long ominous lull — silence — terrifying by con- 
 trast. I felt once as if I were becoming light- 
 headed ; the lightning was shooting like the 
 flash and falling of comets inside my head, and 
 I half dozed, and the great old four-poster bed 
 sailed out through the window^ and swung in 
 circles on the wind blasts ; I could see myself a 
 speck in the waste of clothes, with the curtains 
 spreading out like sails, and hundreds of faces, 
 some forgotten years and years ago, others 
 totally strange, peered at me out of the dark- 
 ness with features luminous as with phosphor. 
 
 Then you came, and you leant down and 
 took both my hands in the way you actually do, 
 and I fell asleep. Now the world has a clean, 
 tear-washed countenance, and the strange serene 
 expression that comes after an outbreak of grief. 
 The church bells are ringing from the villages ; 
 I can see the fields through the open window, 
 and a glorious panorama of clouds. Wonderful 
 galleons and chariots, thrones and Titanic faces, 
 grand unconscious effects, as if the wind, that 
 supreme artist, is modelling them at random. 
 169 
 
be, or stricken with grief, just staring at me ; 
 and I never fail to hear of him or her, or to run 
 against them shortly afterwards. 
 
 Once, it was a hot July day, with a vast 
 expanse of blue-white sky absolutely cloudless ; 
 I was sitting on the porch-step talking to a 
 friend, telling her a story. Suddenly a feeling 
 of oppression clutched me, a sense of chill ; I 
 looked up and saw a black cloudlet sailing 
 nearer. It held my gaze because it was so 
 singular in its solitude and intensity in the 
 serene blue of the sky. It came nearer ; I went 
 on talking. Then it stopped right in front of 
 us, hung poised, then shivered and changed and 
 formed itself into a sharply defined coffin, as 
 clearly outlined as if it were deftly cut out of 
 black paper. I looked at my friend ; she, too, 
 was staring at it ; I stopped speaking. " What is 
 it ?" I asked. She said, " How strange ; it is a 
 coffin ! " " Yes," I said ; " a sign for either you 
 or me," and I marked the date on the calendar, 
 and three weeks afterwards the news came of a 
 brother's sudden terrible death on that date, 
 170 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 If you were here I might rest, for there is a 
 soothing quality in your nearness, rest in your 
 touch always, although you quicken every sense 
 to keener life in me. All my life in my 
 moments of greatest pain I have experienced 
 mentally greater lucidity of thought, more 
 keenness of analysis, have been more alert in 
 recording impressions. Twice when I have 
 gone perilously near the border river, and was 
 physically unable to speak, I have felt in my- 
 self acutely conscious of everything about me, 
 and the processes taking place in myself. 
 
 I wonder would it not aid medical science if 
 people were to note the things that are always 
 the warning heralds of physical disturbance to 
 come in them, as they do the signs of atmo- 
 spheric change ? No two people have, perhaps, 
 quite the same, although I cannot quite believe 
 that ; probably people would fall into groups, 
 subject to like experiences. 
 
 Ever since I was a tiny chUd one thing has 
 been the beginning of illness for me : the form- 
 ing of marbles of certain colours into pyramids, 
 in time to the beat of a clearly defined measure. 
 Each time the pyramid is completed, the last 
 marble forming its apex drops down the centre, 
 
 171 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 and it all begins again. As a child it used to 
 terrify me ; there was a strange horror in the 
 rhythm of it ; I can remember heart-broken, 
 anguished prayers to God not to let those 
 marbles come. Now as a grown woman I can 
 shake it off, but it is always a cry of " 'ware 
 hawk " all the same. If the rhythm of those 
 moving marbles begins to tap in my head, in a 
 train or steamer in time to the piston, I know 
 the journey is telling more than it ought. 
 
 I know some one else who always stays in 
 bed and rests absolutely whenever she is sub- 
 jected to the visitations of faces and masks of 
 surpassing loveliness, beaten out of all shades of 
 gold, which come to her in the dark when she 
 closes her eyes for sleep. They are her danger- 
 signal. The highest form of sanity is, maybe, 
 the clear consciousness that insanity is merely 
 twin brother. Humanity suffers from a too 
 great garrulity about all the petty externals of 
 life, and too great a reticence as to what takes 
 place in that awsome place, the individual soul. 
 Women could tell more than men, but doctors 
 are obstinate folks. Tell a nerve specialist, it 
 you are his patient in a house, that you cannot 
 rest, that you toss and dream because your bed 
 172 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 lies east to west, that to procure calm restful 
 sleep it must be placed due north and south, 
 and he will smile indulgently ; but he won't 
 have your bed moved, unless he happens to feel 
 that way himself. The great all-healer, the 
 wonder-man of medicine of the future, will be 
 the man who will recognise that his diagnosis 
 must begin with the soul of his patient, and not 
 too seldom, if she be a woman, the sex of that. 
 The two callings who are told most lies in the 
 world, or at least more half-truths, are those 
 of the priest and the doctor. 
 
 I wish, I wish, I wish you were here — every- 
 thing, all the tiresome thoughts and wearisome 
 fancies would vanish, and it would be just well 
 with me. I want you more than ever I have 
 done before ; and in saying this I say more than 
 you can fathom, for it has always been my way 
 to go away by myself in hours of pain or 
 trouble, and not show my face to friend or 
 acquaintance until the struggle was over. You 
 have repealed all the laws which have governed 
 my life, made me just a weak dependent atomy 
 whenever my love for you comes into play. 
 
 Some kindly spirit must have leaned over 
 your shoulder and prompted you to write all 
 
 173 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the tender great things in that last letter of 
 yours. I kiss your dear hand, and if you were 
 here I would cuddle up to your breast and say, 
 "Smooth my head and soothe me to sleep, love," 
 not alone for the sake of the love which is in 
 you for me ; but because I am no longer any- 
 thing but the expression of a great absorbing, 
 all-enveloping love for you. You have con- 
 densed this world for me into the compass of 
 your enfolding arms. 
 
 I am very, very tired ; I feel a very miserable 
 morsel of humanity, and yet I cannot help half 
 laughing at myself. If you come to think of 
 the immense world of men outside, entirely 
 ignorant of the woes or love-throes of a small 
 person in a four-poster ; so insignificant an atom 
 as to import less than the fate of an aphis to the 
 sum total of the growth of the world's roses, or 
 one parasite of still more microscopic size on 
 the said aphis. And yet — yet my need of you 
 is more tremendous than all the needs of the 
 universe. The universe is just you and me. 
 Love me, love me, love me ! I need it ! — 
 Longingly your little R. A. 
 
 17+ 
 
XIV 
 
 My Heart's Love, My King of Men, — 
 Master weaver of the fabric which makes life 
 golden ! In a letter I cannot thank you for 
 your last letter, indeed perhaps I could not do 
 so adequately in words. You mistake a little if 
 you think I am giving myself to you blindly ; I 
 am yours in obedience to something fine, and 
 vital, and unexplainable in myself. To know 
 why one loves any one person more than another 
 would be to cease to love them ! Why I am 
 more than all the world to you, and you are 
 more than all the world to me, ay, the only one 
 in the world for me, must ever remain a 
 mystery ; that is the pith of its strength when 
 all is said and done. But beyond this, I am not 
 yours unreasoningly ; I am sure of myself, sure 
 of what I want in life, sure of what you can 
 give me, and better still, sure of what I can give 
 you ! 
 
 175 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 You beg me not to believe that you can give 
 me an adequate return for the " great unselfish 
 devotion " I express for you. Heart's desire, 
 am I then a huckster in the things of my soul ? 
 A nice observer of current values in love, to 
 dole out my affection by scale-measure in return 
 for board, lodging and — a man ? You are more 
 humble than you ought to be ; you say you 
 wish to be as I wish to have you, and I say I 
 wish you to be yourself — your best self. It is 
 you with your faults — ^you have not a few — as 
 much as your good qualities who are dear 
 to me. 
 
 If I ever wish to change you, it is from no 
 selfish motive, but rather because I see that you 
 will suffer in your career, your power over men, 
 your influence as a citizen in your own state, 
 by the preservation of certain attributes. In 
 such matters I would wish to help you to 
 change yourself. 
 
 If I maintain that a woman is better employed 
 in handing pegs to a cobbler she loves, and who 
 satisfies the heart-needs of her peculiar nature, 
 than in turning out misfits in foot wear on her 
 own account ; I do not in the least think of her 
 as of secondary importance, a mere handmaid 
 176 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 of the cobbler. But I believe that if she helps 
 him to drive the pegs straighter, fires him with 
 the ambition to be the best cobbler in his dis- 
 trict, she has done more for the foot-wear of 
 humanity than if she had set up a rival estab- 
 lishment of her own. 
 
 Outwardly woman has always seemed the 
 more enslaved half of humanity ; inwardly she 
 has always been the more free. Whereas a 
 man in the essence of him has always drawn 
 either his strength or weakness from her, she 
 has remained in her very essence unchanged, 
 entirely uninfluenced by him, merely dependent 
 on him for externals. For this reason ever an 
 enigma to him ! Whilst he has been laboriously 
 building up legal, social and moral systems, 
 strait waistcoats for his own enslavement ; 
 woman, the eternal anarchist, has as systema- 
 tically nullified his efforts, and upset his logical 
 calculations ; perhaps the new era will mean 
 that for the first time they will work together. 
 No, if I gave myself to you, dearest one, I do 
 it . with open eyes. If I stand as a child before 
 you, if I obey you willingly, it is not because 
 I live in any awe of you, or fear you as a 
 master ; I have never met any man stronger 
 
 177 M 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 than myself in every way. The superiority 
 was always purely relative — if he were greater 
 in one direction, I was in another, and his mere 
 brute force could always be circumvented by 
 strategy. No, I obey you because I choose to, 
 because it gives me pleasure to own you master 
 — in behest to the love in me ; I like you to 
 take heed of me ; your protection is pleasant ; 
 but I can stand on my own feet, if needs be. 
 If I play the subordinate it is because my heart 
 has elected you king. 
 
 But, make no mistake, were you to presume 
 on your prerogative and wish to play despot, I 
 should dethrone you with a like promptitude. 
 You are my king because I choose you out of 
 the world of men ; you are my master because 
 it is my pleasure to obey you. I choose you 
 quite as much as you choose me, because with 
 you, and you alone, life will be the whole I 
 desire it to be. I have no wish to be your rival 
 in your life's work, but equally I would resent 
 interference with mine. Whilst I respect your 
 opinions, your prejudices, I expect equal toler- 
 ance on your part for those I have. Where 
 you are weaker I shall be glad to lend you of 
 my strength, where you are stronger I would 
 17S 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 beg of you to give me of yours. Where you 
 are smaller I would gladly try to remedy the 
 deficiency by whatever might be greater in my 
 own nature and vice versa. If to laugh with 
 you is just the gladsomest thing in God's good 
 blundering world, it does not on occasion hinder 
 me from laughing at you ; nor do I resent your 
 taking a like liberty, for indeed a sane man will 
 always find subject for mirth in his woman- 
 kind. 
 
 I don't want to be like you nor any man, 
 except in such ways as I might imitate you with 
 advantage to myself ; your code of honour with 
 one another, your esprit de corps is worth taking 
 a lesson from. I have no exaggerated idea of 
 subservience : you are my world, just dearer to 
 me in your ugliness, with your weaknesses and 
 your whims, than all other men put together. 
 I would sooner share a crust with you than 
 feast daintily with any one else, but don't 
 run away with the idea that I mean you or I 
 to be content with " seconds " as sold by the 
 world's bakers. I am not a modern woman for 
 nothing. 
 
 If your will is weak, mine is not. You can 
 use it as a crutch to strengthen yours ; if you 
 
 179 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 lack initiative, I have it in plenty. If I know 
 myself rightly I shall only be content to stay at 
 home as a storage of reserve force from which 
 you can draw the wherewithal to go out and 
 fight anew for our share of the world's cream. 
 If you are ill, disheartened, I can nurse you 
 back to strength and courage. If you were to 
 lose heavily at the game of life, it might be a 
 good thing to know that one soul would under- 
 stand and see clearly where possible to make a 
 fresh start. If you were to be stoned in the 
 market-place I might take my share of the 
 punishment, for a woman's love at any time is 
 courage in its highest potency. 
 
 Have you an enemy you cannot crush, let me 
 see if I cannot circumvent him. But not, and 
 this is what I want you to understand, not out 
 of any old-fashioned idea of womanly submission 
 or meek endurance ; but because alone or in 
 rivalry to you I am half a creature ; with you I 
 can see my way to be a whole. No, because I 
 love you, and out of deference to the love in 
 myself, by the strength and insight and self- 
 assurance which the consciousness of having 
 found the best and greatest thing in life for me, 
 the place I can fill best, and develop myself to 
 i8o 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the uttermost. But to compass this there must 
 be reciprocity. 
 
 It is no woman's part in life to play the role 
 of relieving officer for the preservation of 
 wastrels — to heart-starve while she pours the 
 treasures of her nature into a man with the 
 receptivity of a sieve — any more than it is her 
 duty to go on mothering children to an inheri- 
 tance of disease or insanity. These are matters 
 every thinking woman of to-day must decide 
 for herself, without reference to priest or judge 
 — if she only has courage enough to do so. 
 To see with your eyes would be an irreparable 
 loss to me, and not least to you. 
 
 Remember I have held my own in life, fought 
 my way in the ranks of the workers — a hateful 
 position for a woman of emotional needs. One 
 may gain admirable bread and butter and go 
 heart hungry as a woman — but it has made it 
 possible for me to choose you. There was a 
 want of logic in the old-fashioned notion that 
 the choice depended entirely on the man — it 
 never did. 
 
 Remember that just because I see so clearly 
 and give myself to you so joyfully, so fully, 
 with so complete an understanding of what it 
 
 |8i 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 means — I can stretch out my wrists and let you 
 fasten the handcuffs on (every partnership im- 
 poses its duties) and delight, because I am a 
 woman, in obeying the behests of the great, 
 glorious love in me — in its essence an entirely 
 different sentiment from that glowing in you for 
 me. You can be sure of being loved in a way 
 undreamed of by the man who gained the exact- 
 ing (weakness is always more exacting than 
 strength) blind devotion of the old clinging-ivy 
 type of female. There was a spice of malicious 
 humour in the originator of that simile, for 
 given time the ivy kills the strongest tree. 
 
 No, dear heart, life will be a good and great 
 thing because all joys will be increased and all 
 sorrows made easier. When you write me a 
 letter such as that last of yours, you lend me 
 double courage, I feel strong enough for any 
 fate. I have a strange protective tenderness for 
 you sometimes, with a wistful note in it. Why ? 
 I have never seen any servility in the expression 
 of your need for me. Your weakness is of the 
 kind a woman can strengthen but not hold in 
 contempt ; for it is in a measure a part of the 
 most characteristic of your qualities, a facet, oddly 
 enough, of the strongest attributes in you. Your 
 182 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 curious anomalies are owing, I fancy, to the 
 racial crossing in you. You can't have Russo- 
 Finn and Scotch and French ancestors for 
 nothing. 
 
 Now never write again and point me out 
 reasons why you are undesirable as a parti. It 
 is unworthy of me. All my life I have needed 
 love, needed to love and be loved — but in con- 
 formity with an ideal of my own. Men have 
 cared for me — I know, I have not forgotten, 
 you are jealous of every past lover. You needn't 
 be, tyrant ! For none loved me as I desired. 
 
 One wanted to pop me into a gilt-wired cage, 
 to give him the satisfaction of taming a wild 
 bird, wanted to train me to eat lump sugar out 
 of his hand — he would have given me the best 
 sugar, pure cane, and even an ivory ring to 
 swing in. Another felt I could regenerate him, 
 make a new man of him, imagined he paid me 
 a compliment by offering to allow me to darn 
 the heels of his moral socks ; another thought I 
 had all the necessary qualities to get him on in 
 life and entertain him besides in our hours of 
 leisure — their reasons for wishing to possess me 
 were perhaps unconsciously comical. 
 
 You are the first to love me as I want to be 
 183 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 loved — because I am just I — for myself without 
 knowing why, and you will never be able to 
 explain either. Because I am just the one 
 woman for you whose physical imperfections 
 are as endearing as another wornan's beauty ; 
 whose voice is the echo of another voice in your- 
 self, whispering to you since first you thought 
 of woman, whose faults, I never hide them from 
 you, are but a greater reason you say for loving. 
 See how I remember your dear words. 
 
 Don't be afraid, sweetheart ; love me as much 
 as you will, trust me to find a way to give you 
 back your love with compound interest. We 
 are unlike in so many ways ; I know I bewilder 
 you with my sudden changes ; you have told 
 me I am like an opal, a thing of milk and fire. 
 That if my lips give utterance to daring ideas 
 which frighten you with their audacity, my eyes 
 smile tenderly as they watch the effect ; that my 
 capacity for sitting hours silently has amazed 
 you as much as my capability of tearing a sub- 
 ject to its uttermost shred. That I can draw a 
 white line round myself in vestal moods which 
 you would not dare to cross, or throw my arms 
 round your neck with an abandon which carries 
 you out of yourself, so that you re-feel my 
 184 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 caress for days. That to meet me is always a 
 pleasurable anticipation with a dash of suspense 
 in it, for you know not what my humour may 
 be ; but that underneath all my alternations you 
 always find the one unchanging self, one con- 
 sonant note — and with me in every mood, glad 
 or sad — rest. 
 
 Shall I tell you what I find in you ? No, I'll 
 keep it for another time, for I have told you so 
 many foolish flattering things already, that you'll 
 be for loving me less by way of a change. 
 Whilst you are waiting you can remember that 
 I do think it is worth living and waiting and 
 working just to' love you ! What I think it 
 worth to be loved by you — ah ! well, if you 
 are anxious to hear that you must woo it from 
 me. 
 
 i8s 
 
XV 
 
 My Man of Men, my beloved, — Into what 
 strange place of misconception have you strayed? 
 I am miserable, heart-sick over your last letter. 
 I read it with a sick, helpless feeling gathering 
 in my breast, a kind of paralysis — a sense of 
 gloom as if a cold shadow were settling down 
 over me, shutting out from me all that is good, 
 and glad, and worth living for in life. 
 
 Surely you are not going back to all the old 
 doubts, the old tortured self-questionings ; I 
 thought we had laid them so that even their 
 ghosts would never rise again to walk between 
 you and me. What have I said or done that 
 you again question the wisdom of our union, 
 your own worthiness, our relative positions ? 
 I have told you. How am I to tell you plainly 
 enough? I despair now of words to convey 
 my own settled conviction so that you may 
 understand once and for all, finally, and with 
 i86 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 no possibility of misconception, that your fate 
 and mine are one, that as long as the sun rises 
 and sets for me, I am yours. 
 
 I have not slept, nor eaten, nor rested since I 
 got your letter. My eyes are dry, as if sealed 
 with a film of horn, my head throbs, and I ache 
 in heart and soul and senses. My whole sen- 
 tient being is one great cry, the cry of a drown- 
 ing woman going down in the wastes of some 
 place of dark despair ! How can you write so 
 again to me ? I am glad to have the letter, in 
 so far as it is, as in every letter of yours, a facet 
 struck off red hot in a moment of emotion from 
 the singular whole which makes yourself. Glad 
 in the same way as one might feel a satisfaction 
 in wrenching the dagger away from the grip of 
 one's loved one, even though one cut one's hand 
 badly in the doing ; because one knows at least 
 one holds the weapon with which he might have 
 been about to wound himself. Glad that you 
 can let me see every side of your complex 
 nature. 
 
 You say you are full of longing, insatiable 
 desire to have me near you, that I am in truth 
 the greatest thing the world holds for you — 
 indeed, your letter is the cry of a tortured heart 
 
 187 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 turning in spite of itself to the only one who 
 can comfort it. And yet you bid me pause, 
 weigh, consider, bid me examine closely your 
 weakness ; think over the morbid strain in you, 
 reflect before I bind my bright spirit to your 
 dull clay. How think ? how consider ? how 
 reflect ? 
 
 You bid me think what life will be with you 
 in the solitude of such a place as Vlapostock ; 
 paint vividly to me the struggle your life — our 
 life — may be ; the dreariness of the one long 
 snow-covered street, the dearth of intellectual 
 food, the remoteness from the world's news. 
 Reiterate to me how I shall lose touch with the 
 throbbing of the great world's heart (Vlapostock 
 is a vein of that, I fancy, fed by the same blood), 
 and how I may find you lacking, how I may 
 weary of you. 
 
 You try to tear the rose of our love to tatters, 
 to scatter the petals at my feet, as if I could not 
 feel your hands tremble through your letter, and 
 see the misery cloud your eyes. You hurt me, 
 wound me, sear me, cut me to the quick with 
 your doubts. Take me up close to you, let me 
 wind my arms round your neck, and lay my face 
 to your dear face and tell you — tell you so that 
 i88 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 my every accent will carry conviction — what 
 you are to me, what you are doing when you 
 try to make me stray on a fool's quest in search 
 of a freedom I do not desire. 
 
 You bid me go again into the world before I 
 leave the world to go to you, and make sure 
 before I decide. Make sure of what, my soul's 
 desire ? Can I not make you understand — I 
 thought I had done so — what a marvellous, 
 exquisite thing the coming of love has been to 
 me .'' You are glad to know, you ought to 
 know ; you have seen me leap like a flame to 
 brightness at your touch ; have felt me start 
 and tremble like a sensitive steed at the flick of 
 a whip, when you called my name. You have 
 called me yourself, " My flame witch, sensitive 
 as an aspen leaf to a shiver of wind ! " How can 
 I tell you .'' You know how I have whispered 
 to you of dreams, nay, scarcely dreams, visions 
 I often have of places and things I have never 
 seen. 
 
 The breaking of the surf over coral reefs in 
 seas where the air breathes spice ; the opening of 
 the lotus buds at the whisper of dawn in a 
 world of purple and opal light ; the water shim- 
 mering in exquisite tranquil beauty ; quaint trees 
 
 189 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 outlined against the peach-gold flush with which 
 the whisper of the coming of the sun has stained 
 the brooding, tender face of the expectant sky 
 — an imperceptible movement, and the cream 
 rose petals unfold and buds become blossoms, 
 and blossoms flower-cups borne on the salvers 
 of their dark green leaves. The dawn of beauty 
 in the flush of morning ! Everything lovely I 
 have ever seen in dreams pales into nothingness 
 when I think of how my own soul unfolded at 
 your call — thrilled to an ecstasy which yet held 
 a sense of pain in its intensity. 
 
 Do you not realise that you have twined your 
 fingers in the nerve net of my being, entangled 
 my heart strings so that every touch sets me all 
 a-quiver, singing or sobbing until the blood in 
 me listens, as it were, to the harmonies or dis- 
 cords you evoke. You are not absent from my 
 thoughts one second in the day, and you are some- 
 where in the background and foreground of my 
 dreams at night. If you have made me richer 
 than an empress by the gift of your love, you 
 have made me poorer than any beggar by my 
 dependence on jour^^elity. With the hope 
 of being yours I am a living thing ; rob me of 
 that and I am as the " masks " in your own fairy 
 
 190 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 tales : semblances of humanity which dance and 
 show their faces to the world ; but if you steal 
 behind them they are but hollow shells, holding 
 at most cobwebs and dust. 
 
 God ! don't think I fail to realise how poor 
 you have made me, as well as see clearly how 
 rich I have felt in the security of your affection. 
 Why torture me .'' I am yours with every cell 
 in my brain, every nerve in my body, every 
 fibre of my being ; I am so bitterly unhappy, 
 even sounds jar, every step of the passers-by is 
 pain. The minutes drag like hours ; the night 
 was an eternity ; your words dance in my brain, 
 striking my inner eyeballs with the sting of grit; 
 my food is a subject of loathing. 
 
 Oh ! hold me close, close, dear love, close 
 enough to hurt ; say you only try me ; that it 
 is only the doubt of yourself that inspired your 
 letter. If I could not read your love of me 
 through every line of it, perhaps some remnant 
 of the old weak woman's pride might stay me 
 from writing as I do. Yet no ; there I niake 
 myself smaller than I am ; if one loves greatly, 
 loves well enough, loves as one holding love 
 above^all else in life desires to love and be 
 loved, such husks of a cheap convention fall 
 
 191 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 away as chafF before the rush of some glorious, 
 strong, health-giving breeze. 
 
 No, we two " belong home " together. With- 
 out me you will be as poor as I shall be desolate 
 without you. You are my sun, my joy, my 
 torture, my desire, my reason for living at all ! 
 I am all worn out with the stress of my sorrow. 
 For Love's sake, my sake, our sake, send me 
 a line at once to reassure me, or I may do 
 something desperate, foolish. 
 
 I am dry-eyed, and yet I feel as if tears are 
 trickling steadily somewhere in me, turning my 
 heart to water, wasting my strength, filching 
 my courage. God help me ! I am as an image 
 of wax in the grip of a hot strong hand in this 
 hour of my love labour. Come quickly ; set 
 me out of my suspense ; gather me once again 
 to your embrace, to your heart and your faith 
 in me. Don't think I will let you go, not 
 until I have seen in your eyes that there is no 
 love in them when they rest on my face. 
 
 I always thought, when they watched me, of 
 a bee, the way it searehes and searches a flower, 
 in and out with eager zest — your eyes used to 
 wander over my poor face, gathering in every 
 trick of expression, every bit of modelling, every 
 192 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 mark or line. I used to feel their tender 
 wistfulness in a way that always made me richer 
 by every item noted. No ; I must hear the 
 words of dismissal come through your own lips 
 — then I will go from you without one reproach; 
 what happens then is my affair. 
 
 You don't know me yet. Distance means 
 nothing : if there were no way to go to you 
 except by walking, and it were to take me two 
 years to get to you, I would set about it 
 doggedly. Only two things do I recognise 
 stronger than myself — the wiU of God and the 
 silence of death. I love you with the passion 
 of a woman who has never given of the sacred 
 fire of herself to light any stray passer's pipe, 
 who has never gambled with her heart for 
 pastime, and used her emotions as counters in 
 the game. 
 
 There are dangerous depths in me, but come 
 what may, I pray God I shall be big enough, 
 strong enough to do what is best for you ! Put 
 me out of my suspense. In sorrow and joy, 
 good days and bad days, time and eternity, I am 
 yours. 
 
 My love is like a great flaming torch, by the 
 light of which I can walk through the darkest 
 ♦ 193 N 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 way, if only I can see your eyes lit with answer- 
 ing love at the other end. I can laugh at fear, 
 at expedience, that fetich of the common-souled, 
 laugh at danger. God ! I know none but the 
 fear of losing you ! And I will not lose you, 
 for I have seen that in your eyes which seals you 
 to me. 
 
 My love, even in this heavy hour, calls in me 
 like the note of a golden trumpet bidding me 
 fight for it, even with yourself. Strength, what 
 is strength .'' Measured by muscle, bulk, weight, 
 you could crush me like a moth in your fingers ; 
 have you ever done it and felt a shock at the 
 transition of the fluttering, dancing thing into a 
 smear of silver dust ? But I have tkat in me, 
 that were I near you, near enough to look in 
 your eyes, to send my voice ringing to your 
 ears, would make me strong enough to whirl 
 you off your feet, to sweep away all your doubts, 
 your fears, your lack of belief in yourself, lack 
 of courage (not uncommon in this surfeited age) 
 to face, to dare all for happiness and love. No 
 wonder happiness is shy, no wonder love is so 
 rare, when they do come hand in hand and say : 
 " I am here within your grasp." How seldom 
 do they meet with a soul big enough to stretch 
 194 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 out his arms at once, without hesitation, without 
 questioning, without huckster doubts as to the 
 price to be paid — content to take all risks on 
 the strength of the game. 
 
 There, you have my answer ! and I am all 
 aglow with the consciousness of the courage in 
 myself ; all the tears have dried at the flame in 
 my soul, and if you could see me you would 
 find the old fiery spirit, with what you used to 
 call its glint of disdain at every form of cowar- 
 dice looking steadily out of my eyes into yours ! 
 I am suffering, sufiering horribly, but I'd rather 
 suffer a hundred times over than be without 
 love and you. I must know that I have both ! 
 
 P.S. — Opened this to say just got your dear 
 penitent letter. All right, my own, own, heart's 
 own. I send this all the same, as it will show 
 you the power you have to hurt me. How 
 could you ? And because written to you, it 
 belongs to you, as I do. 
 
 19s 
 
XVI 
 
 My best beloved, my joy-bringer, — It is 
 not my day for coming to you, but the outside 
 world wears such a miserable face, stands cower- 
 ing under the sodden sky from which the rain 
 falls with sullen persistence, that I want to. Ill- 
 tempered gusts of wind hustle the window 
 frames, shriek wantonly down the chimneys, 
 and whistle round the street corners. A sag^ng 
 branch of a leafless rose-bush keeps scratching 
 the window-pane, as if some poor soul is seeking 
 furtively to find a shelter from the cheerlessness 
 outside. 
 
 In here it is warm, and the firelight is flicker- 
 ing, amusing itself, as a child will, by seeking 
 out all the bright things in the room — the quaint 
 brass handles on the bureau, an old copper lid 
 on a mug, a bit of gold broidery on a cushion 
 in the gloomy nest of the old sofa ; the kettle is 
 crooning a song of fire and flame tamed to 
 196 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 everyday use, and the little tea-table is laid for 
 two. 
 
 Do you know it is a fad of mine now, when I 
 am quite alone, to set a place for you ? — you 
 who are always with me in spirit, and to whom 
 I turn involuntarily when a quaint conceit born 
 of some fancy in the fire, or a sudden fear en- 
 gendered by some train of thought, or lately 
 read word flits through my mind. It is a day 
 to make it good for two who are one, happy 
 indoors together — a day to make home the 
 word to conjure with, and " not at home " the 
 word of closure against every measure of intru- 
 sion from outside ; a day for the companionship 
 of one at one's own fireside ! 
 
 You ask me in your letter it I shall not 
 regret England, if I will not hanker back to 
 this wonderful country of riches and world- 
 wide culture where everything is on the grand 
 scale. 
 
 Dear heart, I will say my "Vale England" with 
 no regrets. It is difficult to make a foreigner 
 understand English life of to-day. To give a 
 reason for the change in manners — by the way, 
 there" are none nowadays — the mode of life. 
 To do so would mean a treatise embracing the 
 
 197 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 law of primogeniture, for the younger sons and 
 their belongings are responsible for much of the 
 snobbery running through every grade of upper 
 middle-class life ; the title of an elder brother or 
 even an uncle will provide a score of relations 
 with tin halos of nobility ; the " unworthen- 
 ing of all worths " (that is, guaged by any 
 standard of inherent nobility of character, un- 
 blemished descent, or the noblesse oblige of some 
 fine ideal of life) ; through the encroachment of 
 the plutocracy by marriage into old families of 
 distinction ; the American woman's influence ; 
 the so-called gentlewoman's papers ; the eco- 
 nomic necessity of women working, and a dozen 
 other reasons for the extraordinary state of 
 things prevalent in society. Moreover, there 
 is no England to-day — there is London ! mon- 
 strous, glorious, complex, delightful, baleful 
 London — a gigantic fimgus absorbmg all the 
 rest of the land, a land that becomes more 
 deserted every day. A city spreading itself in 
 every direction, stretching out tentacles like 
 some all-devouring polypus, and clawing the 
 best intelligences of all the rural districts into 
 its big black heart ! A terrible, fascinating, 
 seductive London in a deserted England. And 
 198 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 when one is in London one is — unless one has 
 money, and much of that — as far removed from 
 the enjoyment of a cultured existence as if one 
 really were in Vlapostock. 
 
 The distances are so great as to place a tax 
 on friendship ; the soot and dirt so all pervading 
 as to put a premium on cleanliness. The finest 
 drawing-room in London would not stand the 
 test of sunlight in an open field ! London ! 
 terrible city, in which you can be more desolate 
 than in a corner of the hell of Isolation ; more 
 lonely than in some village in the Andes ; as far 
 removed from any participation in civilised life, 
 unless, as I say, you have money and much of 
 it, as if you were to spend your days in, let us 
 say, Punta Reinas. 
 
 Don't look it up ; it is in the Straits ot 
 Magellan, and consists of one short row of 
 houses, with a diminutive post-office. It is not 
 at all unlike a village in a Norwegian fiord, with 
 its surroundings of still blue water, its glacier- 
 stretches with sprinkling of snow, steep rocky 
 sides, broken by patches of purple heath, and 
 its divinely restful quiet. There is no country 
 in the world where you can live more uncom- 
 fortably on a moderate income, than this of 
 
 199 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ours. To live in the country means to starve 
 intellectually, to be " tabooed " socially, if you 
 have a single individual idea or enough Self- 
 respect to object to patronage — in fact, to be 
 damnably respectable according to the lights of 
 the parson's wife, means to be respectably 
 damned and commensurably dull according to 
 your own, if you be a citizen of any larger 
 world. 
 
 In London — a London of a thousand sets 
 and circles — you can starve in complete com- 
 fort, die in undisturbed solitude, and rot at 
 ease, for as long a period as you have paid your 
 rent in advance, unless your decomposition 
 inconveniences your neighbours. 
 
 London itself, as an object of abstract analysis, 
 cannot fail to fascinate you if you have the gift 
 of sight — a rarer faculty -than is imagined. City 
 of a hundred faces, protean changes ! City 
 of gracious charity and sardonic indifference, 
 correct living and rampant vice. Vice that 
 strikes you insolently in the face, and flits by 
 you gay, insouciant, bacchanalian under a glare 
 of electric light in the most public thorough- 
 fares. 
 
 With money and a judicious use of advertise- 
 
 200 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ment any one can go almost anywhere in English 
 society to-day. Money, dress, and publicity are 
 its three great gods. | As society is always made 
 by women,\not men, they are possibly at the 
 root of the trouble here too. The papers 
 devoted to their interests never appeal to one 
 ideal, one noble end. Each fresh one starts by 
 blowing a preliminary trumpet and stating that 
 it, unlike its contemporaries, purports to appeal 
 to gentlewomen alone, and is actuated by the 
 highest aims. A column is set apart each week 
 to the dull discussion of some ideal of supposed 
 value to women ; and the rest of the paper is 
 given over to fashion plates, face-masseurs, 
 make-up artists, dress, and the chronicles of 
 any one's parties or nobody's weddings for a 
 consideration. 
 
 The dress mania hias become as much a 
 disease as earth-eating in parts of Australia — it 
 works as a canker through every class of life. 
 It would not matter if it only harmed indivi- 
 duals, but it has grown to be the test-gauge of 
 worth ; so that an ordinarily habited body is at 
 the mercy of waiters, servants, shopmen, and all 
 the bther flunkeys whom those who ought to 
 know better have taught to judge by externals. 
 
 20I 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 It forces the majority of people to spend their 
 lives in aping to appear better off than they are. 
 Quite struggling professional men's wives make 
 shift to " dress " for a poor late dinner, when a 
 good meal in the middle of the day, and the 
 honest acknowledgment that they cannot afford 
 special gowns for indifferently prepared food 
 at a supposed fashionable hour, would be the 
 honest way out of it. Nothing short of a return 
 to the old sumptuary laws would save things 
 now. 
 
 It is the day of shoddy materials and sham 
 jewellery ; and the draper perhaps gauges the 
 calibre of the women with most nicety when he 
 sells them moreen, " warranted to rustle like 
 silk." They would wear the winding sheet of 
 a malefactor, or the hempen rope that hanged a 
 matricide, if it could be converted into some 
 fabric that could be bought cheap, have the 
 latest colour ordained by fashion and : " rustle 
 like silk." Cheap and vulgar pretence is the 
 sign-word — no class has escaped it. Women 
 bearing the oldest and proudest names in Britain 
 figure in the illustrated papers cheek by jowl 
 with whistling coons and cake-walk ladies. 
 
 Les extremes se touchent. The aristocracy and 
 
 202 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the proletariat may save England — her rich, 
 ignorant moneyed middle class has been setting 
 her steadily on the down grade ; for over a 
 century they have been studiously learning one 
 thing — the art of " falling soft " — the only art 
 for which they have any particular aptitude. 
 If any great national calamity were to overtake 
 us as a nation, some later-century chronicler 
 of insight will not fail to show that it was the 
 women of to-day who " tipped the balance." 
 
 No, my own, I am ready to face Vlapostock \ 
 Clothe me in hodden, any road of escape from 
 the dress nuisance here would be a relief. It is 
 not alone a nuisance, but it is .an effectual bar 
 to intercourse, since the women have made a 
 dozen liveries a day a sine qua non of visiting 
 them. One would want the dexterity and 
 patience of a quick-change artist to keep pace 
 with their unwritten, but none the less stringent, 
 laws of costuming. 
 
 Some quite nice professional middle-class folk 
 invite one to dinner. One goes, but if one adds 
 up dinner-gown, gloves, hansom fares, &c. ; the 
 result forces one to see that one is paying three 
 times over for an indifferent, inartistic English 
 meal, somewhat dull conversation, with the price 
 203 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 of a delightful new book thrown in. Few people, 
 if any, are worth the time and expense. A 
 tremendous fortune is only desirable as a means 
 of purchasing exclusiveness ; yet you can com- 
 pass that, without any — about the two only 
 things in which money or the lack of it makes 
 one equal. If one has once got beyond the 
 stage, or never reached it, when one is impressed 
 by any one or anything, one is richer than all 
 men. When the shibboleth of the " right " 
 people has lost its ordinary meaning of persons 
 who hav^e money or rank — in fact, externals of 
 some kind, ranging from a seat in the Govern- 
 ment, a house in town, to a cousin who has a 
 brother-in-law a bishop ; and you recognise 
 humorously, that " the only ' right ' people in 
 the world are just the people who happen to 
 suit me," you are on the road to content. 
 
 No, Heart's own, the best things in the world 
 are not purchased by money. On the whole, I 
 am glad that when you have carried out a few 
 of your intentions the keystone of our home 
 will be laid in a smaller community, j Cities are 
 the cemeteries of home. ' The ethical value of 
 decentralisation wiU come to be recognised 
 later on. 
 
 204 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 The best men and women I have known, and 
 therefore the most potent for good, have been 
 those who have been reared in some place away 
 from cities ; whose childhood has been a time of 
 storage, a laying-by of all sort of seeds of asso- 
 ciation for ingathering in the years to come. 
 I'd sooner have a son or daughter of mine grow 
 in one small wooden house, where they would 
 have all the hours of childhood ticked off by the 
 hands of one clock ; where the meaning of the 
 mother's chair in one place sacred to it ; the 
 lighting of the Christmas candle ; the dark 
 corners where the bogles lurked as one went to 
 bed ; would give a central idea round which 
 everything good and sweet in life would be 
 grouped later on — than in a suite of rooms in 
 the finest hotel in the universe. 
 
 If you ask me wonderingly (am I not always 
 a new book to you, so you tell me, you dearest, 
 and kindest heart man !) where I, a woman- 
 child of vagabond circumstances, who has swung 
 in a hammock and watched the Southern Cross ; 
 slept in as many strange places as the year held 
 moons in its course ; have garnered my idea of 
 the paramount value of home as a maker of the 
 best men and women — my idea of big cities as 
 205 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 stinters of the growth of childhood in all its 
 phases, mental, moral and physical ; I will tell 
 you. 
 
 Every thought I have on the subject was 
 suggested by a little wooden North-countree 
 rocking-chair that occupies a place of honour in 
 a house I know. It doesn't match any of the 
 handsome furniture, for it has a simple wooden 
 frame and ordinary loose cushions — it did when 
 it was taken home first, but it has followed the 
 fortunes of its owner's little mistress. It is the 
 only thing I ever coveted from a woman ; as a 
 rule I envy none of their belongings, least of all 
 their husbands. It tells its own tale of the steady 
 industrious upward and outward growth of 
 fortune and honoured position from a small 
 beginning. The little rocking-chair was the 
 pivot, odd as it may seem ; for the woman who 
 sat and rocked in it, planning the hundred small 
 economies, watching the march of the outward 
 world with sensible, intelligent interest, directing 
 her household wisely, seeing issues shrewdly, 
 sewing her baby clothes ; made it a throne round 
 which the whole fabric of a family life centred ; 
 the steering-gear of a ship freighted with the 
 fortunes of many. To me it has been more 
 zo6 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 than an eloquent and suggestive little chair ; it 
 has been a symbol of all that is best for woman ; 
 a lodestone pointing the way to the possession 
 of true power. The little lady who owns it is 
 entirely unknown in the wider world ; no photo- 
 grapher wants the copyright of her likeness, yet 
 it is a query if she has not done more from the 
 empire of her rocking-chair for the growth of 
 humanity than any of the platform speakers. 
 Her influence has been imperceptible but wide- 
 spreading, running off into all sorts of side 
 lines. 
 
 You must buy me a chair with the date of my 
 home-coming carved on the back, dear, and see 
 if I will not try to fill my throne worthily. I 
 wish you were here to-night ; the fire has burned 
 to a great hollow heart ! Nothing is as good 
 as it might be, for I have not you to share it 
 with me. You obsess me ; I fancy I can hear 
 your step in the hall, and I wait and the door 
 does not open, and yet I know you have come, 
 for I can feel your breath on my neck as you 
 stoop to turn my face round to you ; and I know 
 that up there with you, you are really and truly 
 coming to me in spirit in such a moment, to 
 seek me because you yearn for me as I do for 
 
 207 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 you, because my hand is knocking softly and 
 insistently at the door of your heart, and you 
 know that if you come in answer to it you 
 will find mine open to receive you. You guest 
 of a thousand welcomes ! My own, own, dear 
 love — I am all a-wait for you. 
 
 zo8 
 
XVII 
 
 Christmas Eve. 
 
 My Own, my Own, — You who come at all 
 hours of the day calling my name so that I know 
 no rest for listening to your voice ; I come this 
 ■ evening, because I know that up with you the 
 tree will be lighted in all the homes, the Christ- 
 mas fare will be spread and the tapers lighted, 
 and all lonely souls will think with yearning of 
 home and those they love. I know that your 
 thoughts will be with me, and I feel you about 
 me ; you are drawing me to you, so that I feel 
 every fibre in my body strain to go to you — to 
 you who have stolen all that made me an inde- 
 pendent entity. 
 
 England will remember this Yuletide as her 
 " black Yule " ; the whole nation is in mourning; 
 men and women are heavy-eyed with the reading 
 of thelists of dead and wounded. The shops 
 have been gay, the windows crammed with 
 209 o 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 pretty things,, but none the less Christmas here 
 impresses one painfully ; it is a period of 
 gluttony, little else. A tiresome time when 
 bills run up, and every one whose business 'tis 
 to serve you lays wait for you with tip-expectant 
 eye. 
 
 It is strange how little beauty there is here in 
 the Christmas idea, how little poetry. There is 
 none of the " home feeling " that makes it up 
 with you, and partly in Germany and Holland, 
 a time to be good and glad. That sense of the 
 year time as a period of high festival, with 
 something of mystic, sacred, holy in it is 
 lacking. 
 
 In those countries I have sometimes felt as if 
 the old legend was sweet and good to believe in ; 
 have felt as if the Christ-kind of a verity stole 
 in unseen, and slipped a little clinging child- 
 hand into one's palm and lisped of peace on 
 earth, or made one conscious of the spark of the 
 divine in all humanity — the real incarnation. I 
 cannot think of the tiny God-man visiting the 
 streets of London at Yuletide without a pang ! 
 I saw a tiny Jew boy, an exquisite laddie with 
 glorious eyes and crisp curls and finely beaked 
 nose, reading one of the placards at a street 
 
 210 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 corner — a tale of slaughter and misery ! The 
 whimsical idea came to me that if he were really 
 that other little child, how the question would 
 have to come home to him of the futility of his 
 sacrifice. How he would be hustled if he were 
 to lisp parables of peace and forgiveness ; indeed, 
 the least of his opponents would be the frankly 
 pagan Hooligan, who would boot him as an 
 " Iky " ; how vain it would be for him to seek 
 sanctuary in any of the pretentious edifices built 
 in his honour, for their portals are closed for 
 most of the hours of the day. 
 
 Your friend goes home, you tell me, so you 
 will spend Christmas Eve alone. I wish I could 
 drive up in a sleigh and knock at your door ! 
 How my heart would thump until you would 
 come to the door, pipe in hand, and cry out 
 with surprise, with a rush of joy in your eyes, 
 and your voice as I have heard it so often, all 
 broken with gladness. You would draw me in 
 and we would laugh as we always do when we 
 meet from sheer content — content and being 
 together — and I could lure you out for a long 
 drive through the dry clear air. 
 
 Do you remember one we had ? We hardly 
 spoke a word all the way ; mile after mile in 
 
 211 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 silence, and yet our souls played " kiss hands " 
 all the time. I felt your eyes dwell on my face, 
 until it seemed to me you must know each line 
 and curve by heart — and I wondered, wondered 
 what you could find in it worth so much re- 
 reading. A world of swansdown and diamond 
 dust, sharp shadows and a divine quiet only 
 broken by the bells playing a hundred melodies, 
 a delight to ear and heart. And I snuggled so 
 close to you that I could hear your heart beat 
 with my body, not my ears ! If only I could 
 be with you ; what a Yuletide we two would 
 have ! I have only sent you a few books : 
 indeed, I had in intent a less niggardly gift, but 
 a short cut I took through a poor district wiled 
 the money for it out of my pocket to a better, 
 I hope you will think, end. 
 
 I saw a big gaunt man of the " navvy " type 
 leaning against a wall in a passage ; his face was 
 hidden on his folded arms, but his shoulders 
 moved in a way to teU that a big man was crying 
 like a child. I spoke to him, pulled him by 
 the sleeve, persisted and made him talk. He 
 had been in hospital for weeks, had come out to 
 find his place filled up. He had got another 
 and found he was too weak yet to lift weights. 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 The wife had a new baby, and there were two 
 others. I said something about charities : if I 
 had considered a moment I would have held my 
 tongue. All our charity organisations are con- 
 ducted with highly respectable narrowness. It 
 turned out the wife (she isn't legally, in Eng- 
 land) was his dead wife's sister, whom he had 
 married, to use his own words, because " no one 
 else would have as much 'eart for the nippers." 
 She was, therefore, not up to the standard to 
 obtain relief, as any trollop with marriage lines 
 might be. 
 
 Heart's own, you know now where your gift 
 went, and I know you would have smiled until 
 your dear eyes would have been filled with light 
 if you could have seen me with the navvy and 
 the nippers. I went home with him ; they had 
 pawned almost everything. I had a most extra- 
 ordinary afternoon ; I even went with him to 
 release the blankets. There was a poor thing 
 trying to pawn a thin old wedding-ring, and I 
 think, on the whole, I like best to think that 
 the Christ-kind has ceased to come to London 
 when the almanacks say it is his birthday. 
 
 Next year, heart's own, next year. Mean- 
 while I am with ypu, believe me, I am with you 
 213 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 in your lonely room ; you will take me on to 
 your knee, and I will tell over again for my own 
 satisfaction the tale of your fascinating ugliness ; 
 confess to you all sorts of foolish dear things, 
 throwing them out as a bait to lure the like 
 from you. You who can set a chime, a peal of 
 joy_bells in my heart that tell not only of gladness, 
 of content, of peace on earth — but of something 
 else deeper, truer, holier, a little akin with the 
 coming of God ! 
 
 214. 
 
XVIII 
 
 My dear, dear Husband ! — Best name in 
 the world, for indeed it is as such I think of 
 you, for have I not your ring on my hand ? 
 and it only remains to get back to you as 
 quickly as may be, and then we can ratify legally 
 that which we two feel we are now in our hearts. 
 Your letter reached me this evening, your dear, 
 dear letter ! You should not have tried your 
 strength and written at such length. My dear, 
 my dear, you say so much that is great, so 
 much that is tender in It, that I am all shaken 
 with exceeding quiet delight. 
 
 You say from this out " I will in truth be 
 your husband, as you will in truth be my dear, 
 dear wife." I will, with God's help ! I have 
 so little to write to you, it seems to me as if all 
 has been said between us two. All doubts, all 
 _^ears have vanished ; all questions have been 
 answered. Fate in the shape of sudden death 
 215 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the only possible bar between us. It is late ; I 
 am tired ; I have been packing, writing letters, 
 tearing up papers, making all final arrangements 
 the whole day ; yet I cannot go to rest, for you 
 are so with me, now that I am away from you 
 again. I cannot banish you from my thoughts 
 for one moment, am alternately elated with the 
 wonderful joy of certainty, and tremulous with 
 apprehensions that something might delay our 
 meeting. 
 
 You reproach yourself in your letter for not 
 having even asked me how I reached you so 
 quickly, what kind of journey I had, whether I 
 was tired or not. You say that, after I had 
 gone from you again, you remembered how 
 worn I looked, but that, when I was with you, 
 you only saw the promise in my eyes, the smile 
 about my mouth ; felt a marvellous sense of 
 rest and peace enfold you like a falling into 
 sleep in snow — but when I had really, really 
 gone, it came home to you that you had been 
 selfish ; and the tears came to your eyes, and 
 you reproached yourself so bitterly ; wished me 
 back, so that you might prove to me that you 
 were not really careless of me, not merely selfish; 
 only that my being with you at all seemed so 
 216 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 wonderful that it drove every thought away, 
 lulled you into a kind of waking dream of 
 serenest gladness. 
 
 You tell me that you will make up to me for 
 it, you will live only for my happiness, my wel- 
 fare, to compass that is the end and aim of your 
 existence. Your eyes, dear heart, told me all 
 that already. You say that you have knelt 
 every night since and prayed God that we two 
 may walk together in His sight in the ways of 
 righteousness, and not be separated at the end ; 
 (that I have made you sacred to yourself J that 
 your poor room is hallowed by the memory of 
 my presence ; that you see my eyes smiling 
 at you when you close yours to sleep, and feel 
 me near you ; that you wake with a cry, and 
 stretch out your arms to enfold me, and shiver 
 with fear as you realise I am no longer there — 
 but that then the new blessed sense of security 
 awakes in you, and you whisper to yourself, 
 " She is my promised wife ; she will come back. 
 It is only for a little while ! " 
 
 And then you grow calm, and lie quietly 
 until the thought of me glows in you to tender- 
 ness. That is better, love ! I cannot write 
 any more of my own feelings now ; they lie too 
 
 217 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 deep to be voiced in a letter ; they have become 
 holy to me ; I only know I am the happiest 
 woman in the whole world. 
 
 You go back again and again to the fact of 
 my writing so that you got your little wife's 
 letter a few hours after she had left you. You 
 speak of it with the naive wonder of a child. 
 You call me the sweetest, dearest, most wonder- 
 ful woman in the world for thinking of that. 
 You ask me when I contrived to write it. Dear, 
 you remember I coaxed you to sleep, and sat 
 with your hand in mine the evening before 
 I left. Well, I loosened it ever so gently, and 
 tucked it under the rug, and then I wrote my 
 letter kneeling next your bed ; for I knew that 
 if I posted it late that night it woiild come to 
 you in the hour of your trouble at my loss. 
 
 How could you think I would leave you that 
 first day without some consolation, without 
 coming back to you in some form or another ? 
 You tell me it was the most wonderful letter in 
 the world ; that when they put it into your hand, 
 the shock of seeing my writing almost made 
 you faint, for your misery at my going was so 
 intense that you were beside yourself. That the 
 words in it are pure gold ; that they warmed 
 zi8 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 you, thrilled you, made you so exultantly glad 
 that you felt yourself a god amongst men. 
 
 Poor dear ! I forget what I did write ; I only 
 know it was the first letter I wrote to the man I 
 looked upon as my husband, and I tried to tell 
 you what my idea of a wife meant. You say 
 you could hear me speaking the words, feel my 
 breath on your cheek as you read them ; feel 
 me come to you with the quick, silent move- 
 ments you say I have — actually feel me near. 
 And you tell me that you want to kneel and 
 kiss my feet, my hands, to clasp your arms 
 round my waist, and lay your head against me, 
 and tell me as you have never told me of the 
 depth of your entire devotion and your grati- 
 tude, your love for me. My own dear love, I 
 could not have you kneel to me ; no, little 
 husband 1 never that again ! 
 
 You ask me to tell you how I got to you ! 
 Well, when no answer came to my letter, I 
 wired ; then I wired again and prepaid the 
 reply. Your friend answered, " 111." The mo- 
 ment I read that my mind was made up. As 
 always when the real crisis comes I lose my 
 nervousness, my restlessness, and a great calm 
 seizes me, I see clearly and can act promptly ; I 
 
 219 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 packed my bag, took some heavy rugs, and in 
 two hours I was on my way to London. 
 
 I knew that I should be too late for the bank, 
 so I drove straight to Attenborough's (the best 
 representative of our English mont de piete) and 
 left a diamond pendant as security for a little 
 pile of English sovereigns, and caught the night 
 mail to Queensborough. We had a roughish 
 passage, but I sat at the top of the companion- 
 way and let the cold breeze sting me ; I was too 
 nervously strung, I fancy, to feel sick ; I have 
 noticed that before. I seemed to be unconscious 
 of the existence of my body ; I was at one end 
 of a quivering thread of light and you were at 
 the other. I can't explain this, but so I felt it 
 to be, and my name vibrated along it all night 
 in every accent of imploring longing and weary 
 reiteration. It maddened me almost. I cannot 
 recall the journey ; I know Hamburg so well 
 that perhaps the very familiarity of the stations 
 made me not notice them. The hours seemed 
 days ; my knowledge was so vague, I pictured 
 you unconscious, dead ; every terrible possibility 
 cropped up. 
 
 The trains seemed to crawl ; the mad idea 
 came that one could get out, really get out and 
 220 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 shove behind, they made so little advance. The 
 only moments of relief I experienced were those 
 in which I drove from one station to another or 
 to the steamers ; I seemed at least then to be 
 doing something. 
 
 I remember nothing of Copenhagen, nothing 
 of the journey to Stockholm ; I could not eat, 
 I could not rest, I paced up and down the cor- 
 ridor of the sleeper until the little attendant 
 persuaded me to have some coffee with cognac, 
 and I fell asleep. I can recall distinctly the face 
 of a porter with a blue blouse and sabots at 
 Flushing ; but as a whole the journey is a phan- 
 tasmagoria of trains, gangways, great waiting- 
 rooms, twinkling lights on water, and flat roads 
 drawn with geometrical precision. Even when 
 I snatched an hour's sleep, I fancied I could 
 hear the train thump a mocking " Don't you 
 come too late, don't you come too late," until 
 it seemed to me I was like a hollow gourd and 
 the soul of me was crouched up, a tiny thing 
 holding on in suspense inside myself. 
 
 At Helsingfors the strain slackened a little ; 
 the half unfamiliar Swedish and the wholly 
 strange Finnish of some men on the platform 
 worried me ; I went boldly up to a big, well- 
 
 221 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 dressed man and rattled out : " Do you speak 
 English, French, German, or Norwegian, sir ? " 
 as if I were demanding, " Your purse or your 
 life ! " I can never forget his courtesy. He 
 wrote down the name of the station, and " I 
 want to be driven to S." on a card for me. He 
 looked somewhat curious ; I suppose I was 
 rather a wreck. It was bitterly cold : you see 
 I had left the spring behind me to come upon 
 your winter in its death-rattle. 
 
 The two hours dragged interminably ; at any 
 other time the Bible on the waiting-room table 
 might have interested me. There is a fascina- 
 tion about the first chapter of Genesis in other 
 tongues, although, for modern purposes, to 
 learn a language that way has its drawbacks ; 
 I met a quaint German priest once in Rhine- 
 land who used to say the most appalling things 
 in Biblical English. 
 
 As the train left, that dear man turned up 
 again ; he told me he had wired to the station- 
 master to get me a conveyance, as I might after 
 all have a difficulty in making myself understood, 
 and it would be dusk when I arrived. I don't 
 remember even noticing the country or the 
 people, simply sat in dumb misery, until I read 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 the name of the station, then I could have 
 screamed from sheer relief. The station-master 
 came forward, put his heels together, saluted, 
 and took me to an odd sort of phaeton-like 
 conveyance still on runners. 
 
 I have a vague impression of flat country, 
 then a big wooden building, and straight desolate- 
 looking streets with dim lights and square, ugly 
 houses. We pulled up with a jerk, and the 
 man carried my bag into the entry, touched his 
 mangy fur cap, and rattled off over the cobble 
 stones. I mounted the wide wooden stairs ; 
 they gave me an impression of desolate discom- 
 fort, for there were the footmarks of many feet 
 and bits of half-dried mud and snow ; a peal of 
 laughter and voices with the tinkle of a piano 
 sounded from behind the glass- panelled doors 
 of the first flat. I read the name on the china 
 door-plate, and went up again ; at the turn of 
 the next! landing I ran against a tall blue-eyed 
 man with, it struck me at once, the most 
 astonishingly big fair moustache I had ever seen. 
 He raised his hat, apologised, started, looked 
 at me again and cried in French — " Ah ! 
 Maderfioiselle has really come, thank God ! " 
 I don't think I said anything ; we went up 
 223 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 another flight, and he left me in an untidy, 
 dreadful sitting-room. My own photograph 
 stared at me amongst the litter of papers on 
 your table ; I heard you give a cry and I could 
 wait no longer ; I opened the door and rushed 
 in. 
 
 You poor thing ! how you looked ! what a 
 man, what a room ! But nothing in the whole 
 world mattered ; I had you, I could feel you, 
 see you, your hollow eyes stared pitifully out of 
 a gaunt, unshaven face; there was an extraordinary 
 joy blazing in them ! I could smooth my hand 
 over your dear hot head, and when you let me 
 take off my coat and lay aside my hat so that I 
 could kneel next your bed and gather you close 
 to me, and croon over you to my heart's con- 
 tent ; I registered a vow that never again would 
 I let you go ! I suppose Bacher came in ; some 
 one did ; I heard the door closed gently, and my 
 bag was there when I looked round. After- 
 wards when I said : " Let me go, dear, for a 
 little, my feet are cold and my boots are heavy ! " 
 you looked worried as if you did not yet quite 
 realise what it meant. 
 
 I can see it all over again. I sat on the chair 
 near you and took oft my boots, and you lay 
 224 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 with both your hands' palms together under 
 your cheek, it is a trick of yours, and watched 
 me ; and when I got out my slippers and put 
 them on (it was quaint of you to make me leave 
 them behind, and it touched me when you said 
 it was because they were such witnesses to the 
 wonderful fact of my having actually been with 
 you), I saw the tears running down your 
 cheeks. 
 
 You told me afterwards that there was some- 
 thing so intimate, so convincing, such a guaran- 
 tee of what was to come, in, the quiet way I set 
 my boots aside, and drew on the little blue felt 
 slippers. The very fact of their not being new, 
 just those I had worn at home with myself, 
 touched you as nothing had ever done before, 
 and you could not help yourself. Extraordinary 
 person, that little doctor ! what a head ! like a 
 plush ball ! And his comical genuflections ! I 
 made him tell me all I wanted to know : you 
 were over the worst, only weak, in need of 
 nursing, nourishment, cheering up 
 
 If the journey is blurred, not one detail of 
 that wonderful ten days will ever fade in my 
 memory. How contented you were to let me 
 take complete possession of you. Just to lie 
 
 225 p 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 still and watch me make a wholesale clearance 
 of all the litter outside the door. How you 
 submitted to washing, and coloured like a little 
 shy girl because I searched through the chaos 
 of your chest of drawers for a clean nightshirt. 
 Friedrich Augustus Bacher's face was a still 
 greater study, when, having aired it on that 
 hideously unhealthy coil of hot-water pipes in 
 the corner, I took it to him ; and told him to 
 put it on whilst I tried to set things straight in 
 the outer room. 
 
 Happiness is the greatest beautifier. You 
 looked quite a comely boy when I went back. 
 Friedrich Augustus was certainly the most 
 devoted of couriers, for when you dropped 
 asleep we discussed ways and means ; he never 
 told me he had been up a week. I decided to 
 curl up on the big sofa and use his room other- 
 wise. He looked entirely bewildered at my 
 desire for a bath, and it ended in buying a 
 butter tub. Then he went to the little hotel 
 for eatables, and when you woke the lamp was 
 lit and your bouillon was waiting, and my tea 
 was ready to be brewed and there was a pot of 
 crocuses and lily of the valley on the table ; and 
 it is good, just good to transgress all the con- 
 226 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 ventions, to see for one day in a life that look 
 of supreme happiness on the face of the man 
 one loves. 
 
 You grew feverish later and a little light- 
 headed, and when you had your sleeping 
 draught I put on my dressing-gown and knelt 
 beside you and smoothed your head until y9u 
 slept. You were holding my hand as in a vice, 
 and I was so tired : my four weary days and 
 nights' wide-eyed suspense and strain were 
 telling on me, and I dropped asleep in spite of 
 myself. I half felt some one lift me up gently, 
 and lay me next you and tuck my feet up, and 
 cover me with a rug, but I was too exhausted to 
 worry, and after all what did it matter ? 
 
 It was the same good Friedrich Augustus 
 who came with the coffee when the morning 
 was stealing in, and unfamiliar sounds came up 
 from the street below. I had just roused to 
 find that you were wide awake, and had slipped 
 your arm under me ^nd drawn my head close 
 to you ; you only said simply : " Good morning, 
 my dear wife, I am feeling so well, and it is all 
 so good and wonderful, I have been saying the 
 Our Father." And when I sat up my hair was 
 all about my ears, and you cried that they were 
 227 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 fearsome weapons I kept it up with ; might 
 stick in one's ears as one slept ; that you had 
 pulled out every one you could find without 
 waking me. 
 
 How we laughed and how good that coffee 
 was ! — the best I ever tasted. What splendid 
 days followed and how we laughed together — 
 the feast we had when you got up first ! To 
 be real happy is to treat life as an adventure, 
 each day a fresh one, just never to grow up 
 to make a fairy tale of it, and above all never to 
 be afraid of the ogres. The ogres of adverse 
 circumstances or the unexpected trick of fate ! 
 Grin at them, hold on doggedly to your end 
 of the see-saw ; suppose they do keep you down 
 for a while, if you only sit tight enough you 
 will out-tire them, and your end of the plank 
 is bound to go up ; then the laugh is on your 
 side I It's still more on your side if you can see 
 something humorous in your situation when 
 you're down, if you can get a satisfaction out 
 of your own power of endurance. There's a 
 lack of humour in most of the dispensations 
 of Providence : if you can supply the deficiency 
 in yourself, you're just stronger than all the 
 ogres of life. 
 
 Z28 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 What a pair we will be when we make com- 
 mon cause together ! How good it was to 
 give and take ! I loved every little housewifely 
 thing I did for you ; and the best of it all was 
 that it was voluntarily, no duty, no obligation, 
 just service for love's sake. What a fine 
 fellow Friedrich Augustus is ; how gratified he 
 was because I asked him to go with me to buy 
 our betrothal rings. Do you remember when 
 we exchanged them, and we both thanked him 
 for his goodness, and I said that I hoped in 
 all the future he would be our friend as he had 
 been yours ! and then when I asked you " May 
 I ? " and your eyes gave consent, and I stretched, 
 up on my toes and held up my face, he 
 kissed me as solemnly as if he were performing 
 some religious rite. Big, simple, good man ! 
 
 Good-night, dear, dear husband ! do not be 
 anxious, to-morrow will find me in London, 
 and I shall put the work of two days into one. 
 Take care of yourself, you dearest of all things 
 in the world, get strong and well and be happy ! 
 Believe that every second I live is only ot 
 monient because it brings me Tiearer to you, is 
 an effort of will to that end, that best and only 
 end. My dearest, my best beloved ! You 
 
 229 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 holder of my heart and destiny, you keeper of 
 the key to my house of life ! I creep up next 
 you as I did before, and you will gather me 
 close to you and hold my head to you, and we 
 will kiss one another good-night and say our 
 prayers and go to sleep. — Your R.A. 
 
 230 
 
XIX 
 
 London. 
 
 My heart's Own, my very other Me, — I 
 can only write a little. I have had a cab by the 
 hour all day, and I have done wonders, have 
 bought everything I shall need for the long 
 journey later on. I have seen my faithful man- 
 of-law, and by sheer strength of the wonderful 
 happiness and faith which is making a thing of 
 flame and steel of me just now, I forced him 
 against all his convictions, in opposition to all 
 the habits of his business life, to fall in with my 
 views. I simply swept his sedate professional 
 manner to the winds, coaxed, persuaded, and 
 dominated him all in one breath. The money 
 is forthcoming, things are all, all arranged, my 
 way too, not his. 
 
 I could not sit still, I walked about, the swish 
 of rny gown fidgeted him ; finally I sat on the 
 corner of the table with the letter-press ; j 
 
 231 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 could see out ; the sparrows were chattering and 
 building on the roof. He wanted to cross- 
 examine me, to know all about your prospects, 
 your position, when I had decided upon this 
 momentous step, when I had seen you ? I felt 
 like a mischievous little girl when he said, " Is 
 it not rather sudden ? Three weeks ago when 
 you were here you did not mention It." " No," 
 said I, " It was not arranged then ; but I don't 
 think It's at all sudden, my inward conviction 
 is that it has been settled from the beginning of 
 time ! " 
 
 He waived that explanation aside, suggested 
 that to conclude a matter of such Importance by 
 letter was scarcely wise ; I ought surely to see 
 this gentleman, make quite sure, wherever he is. 
 " Vlapostock," said I. It was the first name that 
 came Into my head, and he wouldn't have been 
 
 any the wiser had I said S . " It is rather 
 
 far north," I added ; " I have just been there." 
 " In the last three weeks .'' " I think he doubted 
 my word. " Yes ; I spent ten days there." 
 
 I was getting impatient ; spring was in the 
 
 air, and In every breath of the spring I could 
 
 hear you calling, calling Insistently until my 
 
 blood echoed In response. Outside In the grey 
 
 232 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 courtyard the soot - black tree trunks were 
 speckled with the most exquisite tender green 
 leaflets, bursting into florescence on the still 
 bare branches. A laburnum tree about to blos- 
 som was covered with little clumps, like tiny 
 bunches of grey-green nails with a dot of yellow 
 in each ; two clouds were chasing one another 
 across the rarely seen blue of a London sky. I 
 followed a mad impulse : I asked him quite 
 suddenly if he had ever been in love himself. 
 When I show you his photograph, the audacity 
 of so personal a question to an Englishman of 
 his type will come home to you. 
 
 In all the games of life it is always the most 
 unlikely card which will give you the odd trick. 
 " If you ever were," I added, " you'll know how 
 entirely useless all your arguments are, For if 
 you could prove logically, conclusively, and in- 
 fallibly to me that I am going to be very miser- 
 able a year from now because of this great, glad, 
 good, glorious feeling I have in me to-day, it 
 would not alter my determination one atom ! I 
 would just open my arms wide and cry joy- 
 ously, triumphantly, * Give me to-day ! ' " 
 
 He has odd, hard blue eyes, and I had never 
 seen any emotion in them in all the years I have 
 
 233 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 known him ; none the less upon whatever of 
 heart there is underneath that cold exterior, 
 some woman has written her autograph. I was 
 almost sorry when I saw the efFect of my re- 
 mark, and I looked out through the window to 
 give him time to be himself again. 
 
 He came round and put his hand on my 
 shoulder and said : " You are the most eccen- 
 tric woman, always have been, I have ever 
 known ; I have opened the letters I have re- 
 ceived from you — my nephew has a very fair 
 collection of the stamps of the world cut off 
 your envelopes — with a sense of expectancy, 
 curiosity as to your latest development. I have 
 always conducted your business myself because 
 of the very extraordinary things you have 
 chosen to do with your money at times. In- 
 deed, the still more singular persons you have 
 occasionally sent to this office made it a neces- 
 sity, in order to keep a due decorum on the part 
 of my clerks. I may tell you, now that I shall 
 probably see less of you, that you have been a 
 very bright experience in a somewhat routinous 
 life. I read a novel or two on my summer 
 holiday when the weather keeps me from fishing ; 
 I have regarded your visits and your communi- 
 234 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 cations to me somewhat in the same light. You 
 have reminded me too, in odd moments, in your 
 waywardness, of a lady I knew many years ago ; 
 so that I have a personal feeling beyond the 
 interest one takes in a client ! " 
 
 Smooth sailing after that, dear ! All the 
 office work was set aside, the clerks had to fly, 
 I stayed there three hours, made a fresh will ; I 
 am to sign it at the Consulate in my new name. 
 He sent out for lunch for me, got me a little 
 super-excellent champagne and some exquisite 
 fruit ; said I looked pale when the need for 
 action had worn off. There is not anything in 
 this world much pleasanter than the unexpected 
 discovery of a vein of tender human nature ; 
 with the desire to love and be loved, and the 
 softness that the memory of a past love gives, 
 underneath a cold matter-of-fact exterior, 
 
 I finished my visit appropriately, for when I 
 was leaving and he wished me all luck I put up 
 my face and kissed him — I wonder do you 
 mind ? Why should you ? You, who own 
 every fibre of me, whom my soul is panting to 
 reach, so that living is in a way a pain, what 
 with the call of the spring and the straining 
 heart-beats in myself. I have only to see the 
 
 235 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 export agents to-morrow to arrange for the 
 transport of the heavy cases. 
 
 I am very tired, but very, very happy, I 
 want to be good to all the world ! I don't 
 believe in the chastening hand of sorrow. Some 
 soured old prophet sowed the seed of that 
 fallacy. Joy, love, laughter, chasten best the 
 heart to goodness, to tenderness, to divinest 
 pity 1 Sorrow is a hell-cat brewing bitter broth 
 to give the whole world indigestion ! ) 
 
 I saw three little lads outside a big shop in 
 Holborn ; one was howling bitterly ; I stopped 
 the hansom. There is something touching 
 about little lads, I never care half so well for 
 little maids. There is a quaint pathetic look 
 about their little breeches and coats, they fit 
 so badly, which always makes me laugh, I can 
 never resist them. Besides, as a rule laddies' 
 eyes meet one frankly without the consciousness 
 or the criticism one sees in a girl. " What is 
 he crying for .'' " I asked. The weazen-faced 
 kiddie with old wise eyes answered, pointing to 
 number three : " 'E fritted" (frightened for your 
 elucidation) " 'im ! 'E's alius a doing it ! " '£ 
 grinned. He had a curly head and a comical long 
 lip, and said with a touch of brogue : " Sure, 
 236 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 lady, I was only playin' ! " " It's dangerous," 
 commented No. i severely, " to fritten 'im ; 'e 
 might get 'vulsions, I've 'ad 'em ! " I felt a 
 tug at some new fibre inside me, which I have 
 been unconscious of until lately ; I think all my 
 life my berene detachment has been the best 
 thing I owned — it was the secret of all my gay, 
 bright outlook, my self-sufficiency, undaunted 
 fearlessness. Now I am bankrupt in all that, 
 in all that made a solitary life pleasantly pos- 
 sible ! You hold a mortgage deed on my 
 whole self — were you to foreclose, heart's own, 
 then indeed I should be a beggar — for this 
 bankruptcy admits of no settlement with one's 
 creditors. I took them in and they chose khaki 
 hats, swords, sabretaches, a brass cannon and 
 a drum. The shop girl and I equipped them, 
 and they departed, with pennies in their pockets^ 
 and I hope a temporary gladness in their child 
 hearts. No. i said his uncle was fightin' ole 
 Kroojer, but London children of that class say 
 no " Thank yous." They are born gamblers, 
 accepting everything that comes, ill or good, 
 with a "just my luck " philosophy ! 
 
 The last I saw of them was at the turnstile. 
 Pat was leading a reckless charge to the dis- 
 237 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 comfiture of two portly old gentlemen on the 
 pavement, and I've no doubt it is a case of 
 Boer and Briton down their alley-way. My 
 cabby's smile made me think he had small 
 Tommies of his own somewhere. Mind, love ! 
 underneath all this nonsense I am writing to 
 you, because tired or not I must, must, must 
 be with you ; there is one great central feeling of 
 love, love, love and perfect contented happiness. 
 
 This will be my last letter, dearest, as I will 
 wire from stages on the route — the beginning 
 of the best journey in the world, the journey 
 to you, to journey with you for the rest, with 
 God's will, of our time. 
 
 Thank you, my own dear love, for every 
 hour since I have known you. Thank you for 
 every tender word you have written, every dear 
 name you have ever coined for me ; for every 
 hour of fuller life, for every sharpened sense, 
 every brighter dream I have had since we two 
 found one another. Thank you above all for 
 teaching me through the love you have given 
 me, and called into flame in me, to find myself 
 and the best thing for me as a woman in all the 
 world — the merging of myself and my fate into 
 that of the man it is my glory to love. 
 238 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 In good or bad days, in gladness or sorrow, 
 in every and any fate, with God's help, un- 
 selfishly, and in any case, always lovingly, 
 tenderly, faithfully, your friend, your sweet- 
 heart, your wife. — R. A. 
 
 239 
 
XX 
 
 Early this year she wrote to me a letter, which 
 she sent to me with a curiously carved box 
 holding their letters. She said : 
 
 Dear old Friend, nice Woman Thing ! — 
 You who hold a mortgage on my friendship, 
 and to whom I go often in the way of fond 
 thought, I send you these. You ask me of my- 
 self ; it is difficult for me to write, for I am 
 fearsome of talking of my delight, being as a 
 child who will draw in its breath and fold its 
 little hands with awe at the revelation of some 
 new wonder — and says no words. The wonder 
 of the spring here in the North is as the marvel 
 and enchantment of my own happiness, a thing 
 to be read in the eyes, to be felt in the heart — 
 \poor words can give no realisation of it ! God 
 cait^ive me no better in this life than I have. 
 My intense well-being has made me curiously 
 240 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 humble-hearted, reverent as it were, in the face of 
 the great good which has come to me. My heart 
 is all curd-soft in me. Love has laid the key- 
 stone to an edifice of understanding sympathy 
 in me big enough to embrace all the woes of 
 humanity. I want to take all the suffering 
 souls in the world in my arms to comfort. 
 XiOve that narrows, hardens, or is a mere incar- 
 nation of the flesh without birth of spirit as 
 well, cannot be love. 
 
 There is a magic music somewhere in myself 
 that has a silver whisper in its melody. I find 
 my whole being tuned to its harmony. As one 
 is unconscious of one's body in perfect well- 
 being, I seem to feel no duty irksome ; I cannot 
 feel my feet under me ; the commonest things 
 of living are a delight. And the marvellous, 
 wonderful, never to be explained mystery is that 
 I know he feels as I do — that all day long our 
 souls echo the love whisper in one another's 
 hearts. We sit for hours quietly ; often I look 
 up and answer an unspoken question, one he 
 has only just thought to put, but not had time 
 to clothe in words. At such moments we feel 
 a kind of awe of this strange bond which makes 
 two egoists, as we both are, one. 
 
 241 Q 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 If I were to call to your memory all that is 
 most exquisite, most tender, most loveworthy in 
 this great, good, glad world of ours — the snow- 
 wreaths of the cherry, the blushing, dripping 
 bloom of gnarled old apple-trees in some orchard 
 croft, where the primroses lurk and the speed- 
 well peer through the grass on some perfect day 
 in England ; or Rio bay in a flood of moonlight 
 on a warm night, when the witch moon weaves 
 a magic more insistent in its seductive enchant- 
 ment than in our colder regions ; so that the 
 whisper in the air of the tropical night searches 
 in and tells of the first beginnings of love un- 
 chastened by any ideal ; remind you of that 
 never-to-be-forgotten face you and I once saw 
 smiling down to us out of the blackened 
 canvas in that quaint out-of-the-way chapel — 
 w;onderful face, which spoke to us through the 
 fine proud lips with their tender curves, telling 
 us of the dream-children unborn in us, stirring 
 all that was best in us both, and sent us out 
 into the sordid world again with a fresh vow of 
 fine womanhood in our life's intention ; ay, 
 call to mind all that we two, unlike as we are, 
 have found together of beauty and truth — I 
 would only be striking one note of the perfect 
 242 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 whole which is making of life a Goci-given 
 harmony !j 
 
 How words spoken lightly often work to 
 certain issue ! I can recall something I once 
 said to you about my letters. Yesterday I told 
 him of it. We who always have the same 
 thought, to whom the soul and mind and heart 
 of each other is an open book, came without 
 words to the same conclusion, and so I send you 
 our letters. I have a feeling, it is not exactly a fore- 
 boding, not a shadow, for there can be nothing 
 of shadow for one of us, for I have an abso- 
 lute inviolable belief that the future can bring no 
 existence for one of us — a^part from the other — 
 I cannot explain this, but it carries conviction, 
 and with it comfort, to me, and he has the same 
 faith. The feeling I have is of another kind, a 
 kind of foresight, as it were, of something to 
 come to us both. 
 
 We leave for China next week : he has an 
 appointment as Interpreter and Commercial 
 Agent in connection with the Lu Han Railway. 
 He heard from a Russian friend of the likelihood 
 of tr/)uble. I have no fear. I send you the 
 little gold coin I have always worn as a luck- 
 bringer- I have found my luck — may it bring 
 243 
 
ROSA AMOROSA 
 
 you a tithe even of the gladness that has come 
 to me as my portion. You say that the world 
 is "less good to live in because I am going to the 
 " back of God's speed " so that I cannot pop 
 my " bright, birdlike head " (nice thing !) unex- 
 pectedly through your door, and that you will 
 miss the look in my " elfin eyes alight with some 
 white fire in myself." 
 
 You dear old George ! I gave him your un- 
 decipherable scrawl and he spelled it through ; 
 he takes a strange pleasure in reading all the 
 tender, good things you write to me. 
 
 You tell me the tears — yes, I know they come 
 rarely to you — fill your eyes when you thinlc of 
 me, that you dread hours of discouragement 
 when you will want to draw on the " treasury 
 of my heart." 
 
 Dear, dear woman, if such moments come, 
 think insistently of me. Believe me, I shall come 
 from whichever world I may be in, and I will 
 whisper of love and trust and true friendship, 
 things untouched by mortality, that live ever. 
 Love the begetter of love, the immortal God of 
 all time. 
 
 Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson 6* Co. 
 London &* Edinburgh