I visited the bag this morning:  he had eaten his way out, crumbs and all:  and has, I suppose, become a fieldmouse, for the hay smells invitingly, and it is only a short run over the lawn and a jump over the ha-ha to be in it.  Poor morsels, I prefer them so much undomesticated!

Now this mouse is no allegory, and the paper bag is not a diamond necklace, in spite of the wedding-cake sprinkled over it!  So don’t say that this letter is too hard for your understanding, or you will frighten me from telling you anything foolish again.  Brains are like jewels in this, difference of surface has nothing to do with the size and value of them.  Yours is a beautiful smooth round, like a pearl, and mine all facets and flashes like cut glass.  And yours so much the bigger, and I love it so much the best!  The trap which caught me was baited with one great pearl.  So the mouse comes in with a meaning tied to its tail after all!

LETTER IV.

In all the world, dearest, what is more unequal than love between a man and a woman?  I have been spending an amorous morning and want to share it with you:  but lo, the task of bringing that bit of my life into your vision is altogether beyond me.

What have I been doing?  Dear man, I have been dressmaking! and dress, when one is in the toils, is but a love-letter writ large.  You will see and admire the finished thing, but you will take no interest in the composition.  Therefore I say your love is unequal to mine.

For think how ravished I would be if you brought me a coat and told me it was all your own making!  One day you had thrown down a mere tailor-made thing in the hall, and yet I kissed it as I went by.  And that was at a time when we were only at the handshaking stage, the palsied beginnings of love:—­you, I mean!

But oh, to get you interested in the dress I was making to you to-day!—­the beautiful flowing opening,—­not too flowing:  the elaborate central composition where the heart of me has to come, and the wind-up of the skirt, a long reluctant tailing-off, full of commas and colons of ribbon to make it seem longer, and insertions everywhere.  I dreamed myself in it, retiring through the door after having bidden you good-night, and you watching the long disappearing eloquence of that tail, still saying to you as it vanished, “Good-by, good-by.  I love you so! see me, how slowly I am going!”

Well, that is a bit of my dress-making, a very corporate part of my affection for you; and you are not a bit interested, for I have shown you none of the seamy side; it is that which interests you male creatures, Zolaites, every one of you.

And what have you to show similar, of the thought of me entering into all your masculine pursuits?  Do you go out rabbit-shooting for the love of me?  If so, I trust you make a miss of it every time!  That you are a sportsman is one of the very hardest things in life that I have to bear.