“’For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained to Him; that they cling to Him with their Weakness, not with their Strength.’

“I like to know of what you are thinking when you composed this or that saying—­what suggested it.  May not one be admitted to inspect the machinery of wisdom?  I feel curious to know how thoughts—­real thoughts —­are born.  Not that I hope to win the secret.  Here is the beginning of one (but we poor women can never put together even two of the three ideas which you say go to form a thought):  ’When a wise man makes a false step, will he not go farther than a fool?’ It has just flitted through me.

“I cannot get on with Gibbon, so wait your return to recommence the readings.  I dislike the sneering essence of his writings.  I keep referring to his face, until the dislike seems to become personal.  How different is it with Wordsworth!  And yet I cannot escape from the thought that he is always solemnly thinking of himself (but I do reverence him).  But this is curious; Byron was a greater egoist, and yet I do not feel the same with him.  He reminds me of a beast of the desert, savage and beautiful; and the former is what one would imagine a superior donkey reclaimed from the heathen to be—­a very superior donkey, I mean, with great power of speech and great natural complacency, and whose stubbornness you must admire as part of his mission.  The worst is that no one will imagine anything sublime in a superior donkey, so my simile is unfair and false.  Is it not strange?  I love Wordsworth best, and yet Byron has the greater power over me.  How is that?”

("Because,” Sir Austin wrote beside the query in pencil, “women are cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their hearts to Excellence and Nature’s Inspiration.”)

The letter pursued: 

“I have finished Boiardo and have taken up Berni.  The latter offends me.  I suppose we women do not really care for humour.  You are right in saying we have none ourselves, and ‘cackle’ instead of laugh.  It is true (of me, at least) that ‘Falstaff is only to us an incorrigible fat man.’  I want to know what he illustrates.  And Don Quixote—­what end can be served in making a noble mind ridiculous?—­I hear you say—­practical.  So it is.  We are very narrow, I know.  But we like wit—­practical again!  Or in your words (when I really think they generally come to my aid—­ perhaps it is that it is often all your thought); we ’prefer the rapier thrust, to the broad embrace, of Intelligence.’”

He trifled with the letter for some time, re-reading chosen passages as he walked about the room, and considering he scarce knew what.  There are ideas language is too gross for, and shape too arbitrary, which come to us and have a definite influence upon us, and yet we cannot fasten on the filmy things and make them visible and distinct to ourselves, much less to others.  Why did he twice throw a look into the glass in the