I am too polite to say it, but I have had a taste of the place you spell with four letters.  Also of Heaven.  Just now, with Jack’s thin hand safely in mine, I am hovering around the doors of Paradise in the house of the boys in Kalgan.  If you could see the dusty little Chinese-Mongolian village, hanging on the upper lip of the mouth of the Gobi Desert, you would think it a strange place to find bliss.  But joy can beautify sand and Sodom.

Yesterday my hosts made me take a ride out into the Desert.  Oh, Mate, in spots these glittering golden sands are sublime.  My heart was so light and the air so rare, it was like flying through sunlit space on a legless horse.

Life, or what answers to it, has been going on in the same way since thousands of years before Pharaoh went on that wild lark to the Red Sea.  Every minute I expected to see Abraham and Sarah trailing along with their flocks and their families, hunting a place to stake out a claim, and Noah somewhere on a near-by sand-hill, taking in tickets for the Ark Museum, while the “two by two’s” fed below.  I never heard of these friends being in this part of the country, but you can never tell what a wandering spirit will do.

Jack is getting fat laughing at me.  But Jack never was a lady and does not know what havoc imagination and the spell of the East can play with a loving but lonesome wife.  And take it from me, beloved, he never will.  Nothing gained in exposing all your follies.  He sends love to you.  So do I—­from the joyful heart of a woman whose most terrible troubles never happened.

PEKING, February, 1912.

Mate: 

I do not know whether I can write you sanely or not.  But write you I must.  It is my one outlet in these days of anxious waiting.  I have just cabled Billy Milton, in Nebraska, to come by the first steamer.  I have not an idea what he will do when he gets to Japan, or how I will help him; but he is my one hope.

Yesterday, on our arrival here, I found a desperate letter from Sada San, written hurriedly and sent secretly.  She finds that the man Hara, whom her uncle has promised she shall marry, has a wife and three children!

The man, on the flimsiest pretest, has sent the woman home to clear his establishment for the new wife.  And, Mate, can you believe it, he has kept the children—­the youngest a nursing baby, just three months old!

One of the geisha girls in the tea-house slipped in one night and told Sada.  She went at once to Uncle and asked him if it was true.  He said that it was, and that Sada should consider herself very lucky to be wanted by such a man.  Upon Sada telling him she would die before she would marry the man, he laughed at her.  Since then she has not been permitted to leave her room.

The lucky day for marriage has been found and set.  Thank goodness, it is seventeen days from now, and if Billy races across by Vancouver he can make it.  In the meantime Nebraska seems a million miles away.  I know the heartbeats of the fellow who is riding to the place of execution, with a reprieve.  But seventeen days is a deadly slow nag.