Chapter 9

PartI. Cambridge
Chapter IX

Seven letters written in June:--

Cambridge

Dear Rickie,

I would rather write, and you can guess what kind of letter this is when I say it is a fair copy: I have been making rough drafts 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,

But I'm in love--a detail you've forgotten. I can't listen to English Essays. The wretched Agnes may be an "emissary of Nature," but I only grinned when I read it. I may be extraordinarily civilized, but I don't feel so; I'm in love, and I've found a woman to love me, and I mean to have the hundred other things as well. She wants me to have them--friends and work, and spiritual freedom, and everything. You and your books miss this, because your books are too sedate. Read poetry--not only Shelley. Understand Beatrice, and Clara Middleton, and Brunhilde in the first scene of Gotterdammerung. Understand Goethe when he says "the eternal feminine leads us on," and don't write another English Essay.--Yours ever affectionately,

R.E

Cambridge

Dear Rickie:

What am I to say? "Understand Xanthippe, and Mrs. Bennet, and Elsa in the question scene of Lohengrin"? "Understand Euripides when he says the eternal feminine leads us a pretty dance"? I shall say nothing of the sort. The allusions in this English Essay shall not be literary. My personal objections to Miss Pembroke are as follows:--
(1) She is not serious.
(2) She is not truthful.

Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road
Sawston

My Dear Stewart,

You couldn't know. I didn't know for a moment. But this letter of yours is the most wonderful