why ‘love’ is an active verb in all languages.  It ought to have a passive form, like ‘loquor’ (though that passive should be reserved for parrots).  Forgive the governess!  I seem to have undergone ‘love’ for two men, but one was a fool and the other not quite a rogue, and I dare say I never really loved anybody but myself (and there the verb is very active)!  I love to coquet, but the moment a man comes too close, I feel hunted.  I dare say I was secretly pleased to find my hero tripping, so as to send him packing.  Was ever hero in such a comic plight?  Poor, unlucky hero!  But this will be Greek to you—­the kind you can’t read.  Oh, the men I could have married!  It is curious, when you think of it, the men one little woman might marry and be dutifully absorbed in.  I could have been a bass chorister’s wife or a Baronet’s wife, the wife of an Honourable dolt, and the wife of a dishonourable dramatist. J’en passe et des meilleurs. I could have lived in Calcutta or in Clerkenwell, been received in Belgravia or in Boulogne.  Good Lord! the parts one woman is supposed to be fit for, while the man remains his stolid, stupid self.  Talk of the variety stage!  Or is it that they all want the same thing of her?

“Talking of the variety stage, there would have been the danger, too, of my thirsting for it, even with a Dowager Lady for a stepmother.  The nostalgia of the boards is a disease your love might not have warded off.  You are well rid of both of us.

“You said—­at my first and last supper—­that money and station are the mere veneer of life, the central reality is love.  That is true, if by love you read the love of God, of Christ.  Do you remember my going one day over the works with your poor father?  Well, after I had been through rooms and rooms of whirring machinery infinitely ingenious and diversified—­that made my head ache—­they took me to a shed where stood in a sort of giant peace the great engine that moved it all.  ‘God!’ was my instant thought, and somehow my headache fled.  And ever since then, when I have been oppressed by the complex clatter of life, my thought has gone back to that power-room, to the great simple force behind it all.  I rested in the thought as a swimmer on a placid ocean.  But the ocean is cold and infinite, and of late I have longed for a more human God that loved and forgave, and so I come back to the Christ.  You see Plato never satisfied me.  Your explanation of the B.C. glories was sown on barren soil.  I grant you a nobility in your Plato as of Greek pillars, soaring in the sunlight, but somehow I want the Gothic—­I long for ‘dim religious light’ and windows stained with saints.  Oh, to find my soul again!  If I could tell you how the Convent rises before me as a vision of blessedness—­after life’s ’shaky scraw’—­the cool cloisters, the rows of innocent beds, the delicious old garden.  There are tears at my heart, as I think of it.  What flowers I will bring to my favourite nun....