liberty. I love my own fireside, my own chair, my own books, my own
way. It is little short of torture to have to conform to the rules
of other households, to fall in with other people's arrangements,
to throw my pen down when the gong sounds, to make myself agreeable
to fortuitous visitors, to be led whither I would not. I do this, a
very little, because I do not desire to lose touch with my kind;
but then my work is of a sort which brings me into close touch day
after day with all sorts of people, till I crave for recollection
and repose; the prospect of a round of visits is one that fairly
unmans me. No doubt it implies a certain want of vitality, but one
does not increase one's vitality by making overdrafts upon it; and
then too I am a slave to my pen, and the practice of authorship is
inconsistent with paying visits. Of course the obvious remedy is
marriage; but one cannot marry from prudence, or from a sense of
duty, or even to increase the birth-rate, which I am concerned to
see is diminishing. I am, moreover, to be perfectly frank, a
transcendentalist on the subject of marriage. I know that a happy
marriage is the finest and noblest thing in the world, and I would
resign all the conveniences I possess with the utmost readiness for
it. But a great passion cannot be the result of reflection, or of
desire, or even of hope. One cannot argue oneself into it; one must
be carried away. "You have never let yourself go," says a wise and
gentle aunt, when I bemoan my unhappy fate. To which I reply that I
have never done anything else. I have lain down in streamlets, I
have leapt into silent pools, I have made believe I was in the
presence of a deep emotion, like the dear little girl in one of
Reynolds's pictures, who hugs a fat and lolling spaniel over an
inch-deep trickle of water, for fear he should be drowned. I do not
say that it is not my fault. It is my fault, my own fault, my own
great fault, as we say in the Compline confession. The fault has