Mrs. Rylands read over her husband’s letter and re-read her husband’s letter a very great deal before she set herself to answer it. In many ways he had astonished her. His lucidity¹ struck her as extraordinary. It was not as if he was learning to express himself; it was as if he had been released from some paralysing inhibition. Evidently he had been reading enormously as well as talking, and particularly he had been saturating² himself in the wisdom of Mr. Sempack. At times he passed from pure colloquialism³ to phrases and ideas that instantly recalled Mr. Sempack’s utterances⁴. Perhaps it was better that he should learn to write from Mr. Sempack than from a schoolmaster, even though it was an Eton schoolmaster. The spirit of all he said was quite after her own heart. How could she ever have doubted that there was all this and more also beneath his darkness and his quiet?

To her his vision of affairs seemed fresh and powerful and broad. How much he knew that he had never spoken of before! His implicit⁵ knowledge of the sequence and meaning of strikes and Royal Commissions made her feel not only ignorant but unobservant. She must have read of all these things at the time — or failed to read of them. And she had led debates at Somerville and passed muster⁶ as a girl with an exceptional grasp of social questions!

Well, she must read again and read better. She had thought — before all her thoughts were submerged in her personal passion for him — of some such fellowship as this that was now beginning between them. In discovering Philip anew she was being restored to herself. He wrote of his futility⁷, but in every page she found him feeling his way to action. Futility! She turned over that self-revealing sheet with the word “Organisation⁸” upon it. Half his dreams he had not told her yet because as yet they were untellable.

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