Heavens! I'd rather follow the fortunes of a Nihilist and be sent to Siberia, or drive wild cattle and fight wild blacks with one of your Bush cowboys, than I'd marry the perfect type of an English country gentleman! Give me something REAL--anything but the semi-detached indifference of most of the couples one knows.No.MY man must be strong enough to carry ME off my feet and to break down all the conventions of "OUR CLASS." Then, I'd cheerfully tramp through the forest beside him, if it came to that, or cook his dinner in front of our wigwam.

Now, if my Soldier of Fortune were to ask me to climb the Andes with him in search of that buried treasure! But he won't: and--I confess it, Joan--I'm in mortal terror of his insisting upon my entering the sphere of stock-jobbing respectability instead, and of my being weak enough to consent.

But we haven't got anywhere near that yet.
So far, I'm just--living--trying to make up my mind what it is that I want most.

Do you know, that since my violent attraction to him--or whatever you like to call it--all sorts of odd bits of revelation have come to me as to the things that really matter! For one thing, I'm pretty certain that the ultimate end of Being is Beauty and that Love means Beauty and Beauty means Love.

The immediate result of this discovery is that I'm buying clothes with a reckless disregard of the state of my banking account.
I begin to understand and to sympathise with that pathetic striving after beauty which one sees in the tawdry finery and exaggerated hairdressing of a kitchenmaid--Rosamond Tallant has one who is wonderful to behold as she mounts the area steps on her Sundays out.
Formerly I should have been horrified at that kitchenmaid.