have discovered depths in my own nature I had scarcely suspected.  Except for a few early ebullitions of passion, natural to a warm and romantic disposition, and leaving no harmful after-effects—­ebullitions that by the standards of the higher truth I feel no one can justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no means ashamed—­I come to you a pure and unencumbered man.  I love you.  In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property and further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you a life of wide and generous refinement, travel, books, discussion, and easy relations with a circle of clever and brilliant and thoughtful people with whom my literary work has brought me into contact, and of which, seeing me only as you have done alone in Morningside Park, you can have no idea.  I have a certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic, and I belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of the day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of affairs, artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally, mingle together in the easiest and most delightful intercourse.  That is my real milieu, and one that I am convinced you would not only adorn but delight in.

“I find it very hard to write this letter.  There are so many things I want to tell you, and they stand on such different levels, that the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant, and I find myself doubting if I am really giving you the thread of emotion that should run through all this letter.  For although I must confess it reads very much like an application or a testimonial or some such thing as that, I can assure you I am writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart.  My mind is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and accumulating—­dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching quietly together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music and all that side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and shining in some brilliant throng—­mine; of your looking at flowers in some old-world garden, our garden—­there are splendid places to be got down in Surrey, and a little runabout motor is quite within my means.  You know they say, as, indeed, I have just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written in a state of emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad offers of marriage.  I have often felt before that it is only when one has nothing to say that one can write easy poetry.  Witness Browning.  And how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated desires of what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly sixteen months of letting my mind run on you—­ever since that jolly party at Surbiton, where we raced and beat the other boat.  You steered and I rowed stroke.  My very sentences stumble and give way.  But I do not even care if I am absurd.  I am a resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I have got it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have wanted you.  It isn’t the same thing.  I am afraid because I love you, so that the mere thought of failure hurts.  If I did not love you so much I believe I could win you by sheer force of character, for people tell me I am naturally of the dominating type.  Most of my successes in life have been made with a sort of reckless vigor.