Like most of her letters, it could safely have been written to any sympathetic friend; it was aloof, discreet, unrevealing. Ethel found it difficult to speak of love; what she felt deeply was left unsaid—he remembered phoning a few days ago, earlier than usual, and after she had recognized his voice, hearing her say (as if to a casual acquaintance): “We’re just sitting down to supper.” It didn’t matter that it was long-­distance, and her husband. Yet, after his first moment of astonishment and exasperation, it didn’t matter that she had spoken that way, either, or wrote the kind of letters she did; he knew she couldn’t have given voice to her feelings in the presence of her parents, and she had an inbred distrust of the written word. It had been like that ever since he had first known her; that’s the way she was; and why should he now want her different from the woman who had attracted him at the beginning—what right had he to expect the impossible, the uncharacteristic? If her letters as a girl in love had been the same during that summer when she had put passion behind her and gone abroad To Decide—(This afternoon went off on another tour, to Stoke Poges church, pronounced Stoke Pógees, where Thomas Grey wrote the elegy. A lovely old church with a hole in the wall back of the altar, a squint hole where lepers watched the services. The yew tree under which he is reputed to have written the elegy is a beautiful but brittle old tree, at least a thousand years old, according to the vicar who was in the church and told us many things. Which revived my faith in the guide, who had already told us the same. Wm Penn’s sons and grandsons are also buried there. Love, Ethel)—if, that is, this was the girl he had loved and these were the kind of letters he had pored over with the irrational excitement of the lover—why should he expect, now, outbursts of love which would never be forthcoming, which were not in her power to produce, the very absence of which, indeed, he loved her for? He knew—he didn’t need to be told—and what were words anyhow? Her noncommittal letter then had shown him so plainly the lonely girl of twenty-four standing in the English churchyard among the tourists, gazing dutifully at the yew tree because she had paid good money to do just that, but daydreaming of the husband with whom, arm in arm, she might someday stand on this very spot again; and later, in the dingy hotel room, taking up the pretentiously crested stationery and resolutely putting all marriage nonsense aside (how could it be else but nonsense since it hadn’t happened yet?) in order faithfully to describe the church, the hole in the altar wall, the vicar, the yew tree, anything but her emotions. So it was still. In the domestic accents of this morning’s letter, which he now folded and put back in the book, love rang from every syllable—at least to the man who had kept the letter because it was written by the woman he knew so well and could never get along without, the woman whom habit or custom sometimes dulled or obscured, the woman who loved him.