If my letters sometimes read disjointedly, you must understand that
I never finish one at a sitting, but write at intervals, when the
mood is on me.

The mood is not on me now.


IX.

EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN FLEMMING.

August 23, 1872.

I have just returned from the strangest interview with Marjorie.
She has all but confessed to me her interest in you. But with what
modesty and dignity! Her words elude my pen as I attempt to put
them on paper; and, indeed, it was not so much what she said as her
manner; and that I cannot reproduce. Perhaps it was of a piece with
the strangeness of this whole business, that she should tacitly
acknowledge to a third party the love she feels for a man she has
never beheld! But I have lost, through your aid, the faculty of
being surprised. I accept things as people do in dreams. Now that I
am again in my room, it all appears like an illusion--the black
masses of Rembrandtish shadow under the trees, the fireflies
whirling in Pyrrhic dances among the shrubbery, the sea over there,
Marjorie sitting on the hammock!

It is past midnight, and I am too sleepy to write more.

Thursday Morning.