Galgenberg, Oct. 9th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I am very sorry indeed to hear that your
engagement is broken off. I feared something of the sort was going to
happen because of all the things you nearly said and didn't in your
letters lately. Are you very much troubled and worried? Please let me
turn into the elder sister for a little again and give you the small
relief of having an attentive listener. It seems to have been rather an
unsatisfactory time for you all along. I don't really quite know what to
say. I am anyhow most sincerely sorry, but I find it extraordinarily
difficult to talk about Miss Cheriton. It is of course lamentable that
our writing to each other should have been, as you say it was, so often
the cause of quarrels. You never told me so, or I would at once have
stopped. You fill several pages with surprise that a girl of twenty-two
can be so different from what she appears, that so soft and tender an
outside can have beneath it such unfathomable depths of hardness. I
think you have probably gone to the other extreme now, and because you
admired so much are all the more violently critical. It is probable that
Miss Cheriton is all that you first thought her, unusually charming and
sympathetic and lovable, and your characters simply didn't suit each
other. Don't think too unkindly in your first anger. I am so very sorry;
sorry for you, who must feel as if your life had been convulsed by an
earthquake, and all its familiar features disarranged; sorry for your
father's disappointment; sorry for Miss Cheriton, who must have been
wretched. But how infinitely wiser to draw back in time and not, for
want of courage, drift on into that supreme catastrophe, marriage. You
mustn't suppose me cynical in calling it a catastrophe--perhaps I mean
it only in its harmless sense of _dénouement_; and if I don't I can't
see that it is cynical to recognize a spade when you see it as certainly
a spade. But do not let yourself go to bitterness, and so turn into a
cynic yourself. You say Miss Cheriton apparently prefers a duke, and are
very angry. But why if, as you declare, you have not really loved her
for months past, are you angry? Why should she not prefer a duke?
Perhaps he is quite a nice one, and you may be certain she felt at once,
the very instant, when you left off caring for her. About such things it
is as difficult for a woman to be mistaken as it is for a barometer to
be hoodwinked in matters meteorologic. It was that, and never the duke,
that first influenced her. I am as sure of it as if I could see into her
heart. Of course she loved you. But no girl with a spark of decency
would cling on to a reluctant lover. What an exceedingly poor thing in
girls she would be who did. I can't tell you how much ashamed I am of
that sort of girl, the girl who clings, who follows, who laments,--as if
the world, the splendid, amazing world, were empty of everything but one
single man, and there were no sun shining, no birds singing, no winds
blowing, no hills to climb, no trees to sit under, no books to read, no
friends to be with, no work to do, no heaven to go to. I feel now for
the first time that I would like to know Miss Cheriton. But it is really
almost impossibly difficult to write this letter; each thing I say seems
something I had better not have said. Write to me about your troubles as
often as you feel it helps you, and believe that I do most heartily
sympathize with you both, but don't mind, and forgive me, if my answers
are not satisfactory. I am unpracticed and ill at ease, clumsy, limited,
in this matter of frank writing about feelings, a matter in which you so
far surpass me. But I am always most sincerely your friend,