“I suppose that Scotch governess is pious; I mean she has a backbone of what they call dogma; things are right or wrong in her mind—­no haziness.  Now, I am going to make a confession.  I’ve been thinking of religion.  Don’t mock.  You know I was brought up religious, and I am religious.  I go to church—­well, you know how I feel and especially the things I don’t believe.  I go to church to be entertained.  I read the other day that Cardinal Manning said:  ’The three greatest evils in the world today are French devotional books, theatrical music, and the pulpit orator.  And the last is the worst.’  I wonder.  I often feel as if I had been to a performance.  No.  It is not about sin that I am especially thinking, but the sinner.  One ought to do something.  Sometimes I think I ought to go to the city.  You know I was in a College Settlement for a while.  Now I mean something permanent, devoted to the poor as a life occupation, like a nun or something of that sort.  You think this is a mood?  Perhaps.  There have always been so many things before me to do, and I wanted to do them all.  And I do not stick to anything?  You must not presume to say that, because I confide to you all my errant thoughts.  You have not confided in me—­I don’t insinuate that you have anything to confide but I cannot help saying that if you have found a pure and clear-minded girl —­Heaven knows what she will be when she is a woman I—­I am sorry she is not poor.”

But if Philip did not pour out his heart to his old friend, he did open a lively and frequent correspondence with Alice.  Not about the person who was always in his thoughts—­oh, no—­but about himself, and all he was doing, in the not unreasonable expectation that the news would go where he could not send it directly—­so many ingenious ways has love of attaining its object.  And if Alice, no doubt, understood all this, she was nevertheless delighted, and took great pleasure in chronicling the news of the village and giving all the details that came in her way about the millionaire family.  This connection with the world, if only by correspondence, was an outlet to her reserved and secluded life.  And her letters recorded more of her character, of her feeling, than he had known in all his boyhood.  When Alice mentioned, as it were by chance, that Evelyn had asked, more than once, when she had spoken of receiving letters, if her cousin was going on with his story, Philip felt that the connection was not broken.

Going on with his story he was, and with good heart.  The thought that “she” might some day read it was inspiration enough.  Any real creation, by pen or brush or chisel, must express the artist and be made in independence of the demands of a vague public.  Art is vitiated when the commercial demand, which may be a needed stimulus, presides at the creation.  But it is doubtful if any artist in letters, or in form or color, ever did anything well without having in mind some special person, whose approval was desired