and dear as ever,--if only you would just take a sudden fancy for
someone else!

Meanwhile the months were going by, and the day drawing nearer when, for
a brief moment of fire, the orbits of those two separated lives were to
touch once more.

What of Isabel during these months? The woman whom God had created for
Theophilus Londonderry did not forget her promise to write to the woman
whom Theophilus Londonderry had created in his own image. Wonderful
letters, of course! Why don't women publish volumes of their letters, as
men collect their scattered essays? There is no writing in the world
more immediately, conqueringly personal than a really clever woman's
letters; and they are not always compromising.

Isabel's letters were the perfection of self-expression. Her handwriting
swept across the page just as she would walk down a street, at once
eager and yet stately and subtle-rhythmed; the shape of some of the
words reminded you of her hats,--hats everyone thought she paid guineas
for, but which she made for herself at a cost perhaps of five shillings:
hats which were Paris with a touch of fairyland, somewhere an
unobtrusive feather of the fantastic, somewhere a personal magic in the
inimitable twist or lie of a bow--; her face looked out at you from a
_g_ or an _x_, a gesture flashed back to you in a sudden distinguished
stroke of the pen, and her voice was somewhere, everywhere, among the
words, like a violin.

Without any apparent literary device she contrived to make you, while
you read her letters, do what she was doing, see what she was seeing,
and form, as though acted on by some magic property in the words,