comparison!  What a helpless, hopeless confession of failure!  No; either the whole short life, closed by the premature death, must have been designed, planned, executed deliberately; or else God is at the mercy of blank cross-currents, opposing forces, tendencies even stronger than Himself; and then the very idea of God crumbles away, and God becomes the blank and inscrutable force working behind a gentle, good-humoured will, which would be kind and gracious if it could, but is trammelled and bound by something stronger; that was the Greek view, of course—­God above man, and Fate above God.  The worst of it is that it has a horrible vraisemblance, and seems to lie even nearer to the facts of life than our own tender-hearted and sentimental theories and schemes of religion.

But whether it be God or fate, the burden has to be borne.  And my one endeavour must be to bear it myself, consciously and courageously, and to shift it so far as I can from the gentler and tenderer shoulders of those whose life is so strangely linked with mine.

May 25, 1890.

One sees a house, like the house we now live in, from a road as one passes, from the windows of a train.  It seems to be set at the end of the world, with the earth’s sunset distance behind it—­it seems a fortress of quiet, a place of infinite peace; and then one lives in it, and behold, it is a centre of a little active life, with all sorts of cross-currents darting to and fro, over it, past it.

Or again one thinks, as one sees such a house in passing, that there at least one could live in meditation and cloistered calm; that there would be neither cares nor anxieties; that one would be content to sit, just looking out at the quiet fields, pacing to and fro, receiving impressions, musing, selecting, apprehending—­and then one lives there, and the stream of life is as turbid, as fretful as ever.  The strange thing is that such delusions survive any amount of experience; that one cannot read into other lives the things that trouble one’s own.

A little definite scheme opens before us here; old friends of Maud’s find us out, simple, kindly, tiresome people.  There is an exchange of small civilities, there are duties, activities, relationships.  To Maud these things come by the light of nature; to her the simplest interchange of definite thoughts is as natural as to breathe.  I hear her calm, sweet, full voice answering, asking.  To me these things are utterly wearisome and profitless.  I want only to speak of the things for which I care, and to people attuned to the same key of thought; a basis of sympathy and temperamental differences—­that is the perfect union of qualities for a friend.  But these stolid, kindly parsons, with brisk, active wives, ingenuous daughters, heavy sons—­I want either to know them better, or not to know them at all.  I want to enter the house, the furnished chambers of people’s minds; and I am willing enough to throw my own open to a cordial guest; but