Charlotte is as clever as ever, and sometimes asks Ernest to come and stay with her and her husband near Dover, I suppose because she knows that the invitation will not be agreeable to him.  There is a de haut en bas tone in all her letters; it is rather hard to lay one’s finger upon it but Ernest never gets a letter from her without feeling that he is being written to by one who has had direct communication with an angel.  “What an awful creature,” he once said to me, “that angel must have been if it had anything to do with making Charlotte what she is.”

“Could you like,” she wrote to him not long ago, “the thoughts of a little sea change here?  The top of the cliffs will soon be bright with heather:  the gorse must be out already, and the heather I should think begun, to judge by the state of the hill at Ewell, and heather or no heather—­the cliffs are always beautiful, and if you come your room shall be cosy so that you may have a resting corner to yourself.  Nineteen and sixpence is the price of a return-ticket which covers a month.  Would you decide just as you would yourself like, only if you come we would hope to try and make it bright for you; but you must not feel it a burden on your mind if you feel disinclined to come in this direction.”

“When I have a bad nightmare,” said Ernest to me, laughing as he showed me this letter, “I dream that I have got to stay with Charlotte.”

Her letters are supposed to be unusually well written, and I believe it is said among the family that Charlotte has far more real literary power than Ernest has.  Sometimes we think that she is writing at him as much as to say, “There now—­don’t you think you are the only one of us who can write; read this!  And if you want a telling bit of descriptive writing for your next book, you can make what use of it you like.”  I daresay she writes very well, but she has fallen under the dominion of the words “hope,” “think,” “feel,” “try,” “bright,” and “little,” and can hardly write a page without introducing all these words and some of them more than once.  All this has the effect of making her style monotonous.

Ernest is as fond of music as ever, perhaps more so, and of late years has added musical composition to the other irons in his fire.  He finds it still a little difficult, and is in constant trouble through getting into the key of C sharp after beginning in the key of C and being unable to get back again.

“Getting into the key of C sharp,” he said, “is like an unprotected female travelling on the Metropolitan Railway, and finding herself at Shepherd’s Bush, without quite knowing where she wants to go to.  How is she ever to get safe back to Clapham Junction?  And Clapham Junction won’t quite do either, for Clapham Junction is like the diminished seventh—­susceptible of such enharmonic change, that you can resolve it into all the possible termini of music.”

Talking of music reminds me of a little passage that took place between Ernest and Miss Skinner, Dr Skinner’s eldest daughter, not so very long ago.  Dr Skinner had long left Roughborough, and had become Dean of a Cathedral in one of our Midland counties—­a position which exactly suited him.  Finding himself once in the neighbourhood Ernest called, for old acquaintance sake, and was hospitably entertained at lunch.