DEAR JOE,—­You will be glad to know that I am getting back to myself.  The peace and stillness of the white winter over the hills is healing me.  It seems good merely to exist, to sleep and eat and exercise and read.  I can’t think now how I behaved so unaccountably those last few weeks, and I wonder if you will ever understand.  I have been reading over and over again your long letter, trying hard to puzzle out its meanings, but I fear I am very ignorant.  I know nothing of the crisis you speak of.  I know that “ye have the poor always with you,” I know that there is much suffering in the world—­I have suffered myself—­but I cannot see that living among the poor is going to help vitally.  Should we not all live on the highest level possible?  Level up instead of leveling down.  Ignorance, dirt, and sickness do not attract me ... and now here among the hills the terrible city seems like a fading nightmare.  It would be better if people lived in the country.  I feel that the city is a mistake.  But of one thing I am sure.  I understand that you cannot help doing what you are doing, and I know that it would have been a wrong if I had interfered with your life.  I would have been a drag on you and defeated your purposes, and in the end we would both have been very unhappy.  It seems to me most marriages are.  Write me what you are doing, where you are living, and how you are.

  Yours,

  MYRA.

He had smiled over some of the phrases in this letter, particularly, “I feel that the city is a mistake.”  Would Myra ever know that her very personality and all of her life were interwoven inextricably with the industrial city—­that the clothes she wore, the food she ate, the books she studied, the letter she wrote him, even down to ink, pen, and paper, the education and advantages she enjoyed, were all wrought in the mills, the mines, the offices, and by the interchange and inweaving and mighty labors of industrialism?  The city teacher is paid by taxes levied on the commerce and labors of men, and the very farmer cannot heighten his life without exchange with the city.

And so her letter made him smile.  Yet at the same time it stirred him mightily.  All through it he could read renunciation; she was giving him up; she was loosening her hold over him; she was nobly sacrificing her love to his life-work.  And she announced herself as teachable and receptive.  She could not yet understand, but understanding might come in time.

So in the night he tried to send his thought over the hills, flash his spirit into hers, in the great hope that she would thrill with a new comprehension, a new awakening....  In a world so mysterious, in an existence so strange, so impossible, so unbelievable, might such a miracle be stranger than the breath he breathed and the passions he felt?

And so in that hope, that great wild hope, he fell asleep in the uneventful beginnings of the battle.  And all through those unconscious hours forces were shaping about him and within him to bear his life through strange ways and among strange people.  His theories, so easy as he drank them out of books, were to be tested in the living world of men and women, in that reality that hits back when we strike it, and that batters us about like driftwood in the whirlpool.