all the morning. When I talk I get angry, and also at times try
to be clever--two reasons why I fail to get attention paid to me.
This is a letter of the prudent sort. If it makes you break off
the engagement, its work is done. You are not a person who ought
to marry at all. You are unfitted in body: that we once
discussed. You are also unfitted in soul: you want and you need
to like many people, and a man of that sort ought not to marry.
"You never were attached to that great sect" who can like one
person only, and if you try to enter it you will find
destruction. I have read in books and I cannot afford to despise
books, they are all that I have to go by--that men and women
desire different things. Man wants to love mankind; woman wants
to love one man. When she has him her work is over. She is the
emissary of Nature, and Nature's bidding has been fulfilled. But
man does not care a damn for Nature--or at least only a very
little damn. He cares for a hundred things besides, and the more
civilized he is the more he will care for these other hundred
things, and demand not only--a wife and children, but also
friends, and work, and spiritual freedom.

I believe you to be extraordinarily civilized.--Yours ever,

S.A.


Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road,
Sawston

Dear Ansell,