But before I bring you up to date with regard to recent events, I had better tell you a few facts about my more remote past.  I refer to Mary.  I have already told you that I found a past necessary.  At that time I hoped that something fairly abstract would do.  But Desire does not like abstractions.  She likes to “know where she is.”  So I had to tell her about Mary.  I’ll tell you, too, before I forget details and for heaven’s sake get them right!  You never can tell when your knowledge may be needed.  In the first place there is the name.  I’m rather proud of that.  I had to choose it at a moment’s notice and I did not hesitate.  Desire herself says it is a lovely name.  And so safe—­amn’t I right in the impression that every second girl in Bainbridge and elsewhere is called Mary?  Mary, my Mary, might be anybody.

Here, then, are the main facts.  I have had (pre-war) a serious attachment.  It was an affection tragically misplaced.  She did not love me.  She loved another.  She may, or may not, have married him.  (It would have been better to have had the marriage certain, but I didn’t see it in time.) I will never care for another woman.  Her name was Mary.  Please tabulate this romance where you can put your hand on it.  I may need your help at any time.  As a doctor your aid would be invaluable should it become necessary for Mary to decease.

And now to leave romance for reality.  Your long and lucid discourse on masked epilepsy was most helpful.  It was almost as informing as Li Ho’s diagnosis of “moon-devil.”  Both have the merit of leaving the inquirer with an open mind.  However—­let’s get on.  If you have had my later letters you will know that circumstances indicated an elopement.  But the more I thought of eloping, the more I disliked the idea.  My father was not a man who would have eloped.  And, in spite of Aunt Caroline’s lobsters and lemons, I am very like my father.  “That I have stolen away this old man’s daughter—­” Somehow it seemed very Othelloish.  I decided to simply tell Dr. Farr, calmly and reasonably, that Desire and I had decided to marry.  I did tell him.  I was calm and reasonable.  But he wasn’t.

There is a bit of sound tactics which says, “Never let the enemy surprise you.”  But how is one to keep him from doing it if he insists?  The surer you are that the enemy is going to do a certain thing, the more surprised you are when he doesn’t.  Now I felt sure that when Dr. Farr heard the news he would have a fit.  I expected him to use language and even his umbrella.  But nothing of this kind happened.  He simply sat there like a slightly faded and vague old gentleman and said “So?”—­just like that.

I assured him, as delicately as possible that it was so.

Then, without warning, he began to weep.  John, it was horrible!  I can’t describe it.  You would have to see his blurred old face and depthless eyes before you could understand.  Tears are healthy, normal things.  They were never meant for faces like his.  I must have said something, in a kind of horror, for he got up suddenly and trotted off into the woods, without as much as a whisper.