...  “So much for myself; yet I tell you but a tithe of my own story unless I let you know how matters stand with poor Hudson, for he gives me more to think about just now than anything else in the world.  I need a good deal of courage to begin this chapter.  You warned me, you know, and I made rather light of your warning.  I have had all kinds of hopes and fears, but hitherto, in writing to you, I have resolutely put the hopes foremost.  Now, however, my pride has forsaken me, and I should like hugely to give expression to a little comfortable despair.  I should like to say, ’My dear wise woman, you were right and I was wrong; you were a shrewd observer and I was a meddlesome donkey!’ When I think of a little talk we had about the ‘salubrity of genius,’ I feel my ears tingle.  If this is salubrity, give me raging disease!  I ’m pestered to death; I go about with a chronic heartache; there are moments when I could shed salt tears.  There ’s a pretty portrait of the most placid of men!  I wish I could make you understand; or rather, I wish you could make me!  I don’t understand a jot; it ’s a hideous, mocking mystery; I give it up!  I don’t in the least give it up, you know; I ’m incapable of giving it up.  I sit holding my head by the hour, racking my brain, wondering what under heaven is to be done.  You told me at Northampton that I took the thing too easily; you would tell me now, perhaps, that I take it too hard.  I do, altogether; but it can’t be helped.  Without flattering myself, I may say I ’m sympathetic.  Many another man before this would have cast his perplexities to the winds and declared that Mr. Hudson must lie on his bed as he had made it.  Some men, perhaps, would even say that I am making a mighty ado about nothing; that I have only to give him rope, and he will tire himself out.  But he tugs at his rope altogether too hard for me to hold it comfortably.  I certainly never pretended the thing was anything else than an experiment; I promised nothing, I answered for nothing; I only said the case was hopeful, and that it would be a shame to neglect it.  I have done my best, and if the machine is running down I have a right to stand aside and let it scuttle.  Amen, amen!  No, I can write that, but I can’t feel it.  I can’t be just; I can only be generous.  I love the poor fellow and I can’t give him up.  As for understanding him, that ’s another matter; nowadays I don’t believe even you would.  One’s wits are sadly pestered over here, I assure you, and I ’m in the way of seeing more than one puzzling specimen of human nature.  Roderick and Miss Light, between them!...  Have n’t I already told you about Miss Light?  Last winter everything was perfection.  Roderick struck out bravely, did really great things, and proved himself, as I supposed, thoroughly solid.  He was strong, he was first-rate; I felt perfectly secure and sang private paeans of joy.  We had passed at a bound into the open sea, and left danger behind.  But in the summer I began to be puzzled, though I succeeded