ly we hear the deep underground
reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of
thought or passion beneath us.

I wish the girl would go. I don't like to look at her so much, and yet I
cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that I ought to
know,--something that she was made to tell and I to hear,--lying there
ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make
a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the
truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the
dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in
an hour of passion.

It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track. The
Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words. Set
your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could give you which
settle all that matter. I don't wonder, however, that you confounded the
Great Secret with the Three Words.

I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell.
When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the morning of the
fifth of July. And just as that little patriotic implement is made with
a slender train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp
eye can almost always see the train leading from a young girl's eye or
lip to the "I love you" in her heart. But the Three Words are not the
Great Secret I mean. No, women's faces are only one of the tablets
on which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols. It lies
deeper than Love, though very probably Love is a part of it. Some, I
think,--Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others. I
can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem
to me to come near the region where I think it lies. I have known two
persons who pursued it with the passion of the old alchemists,--all
wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving up the daily search
for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to
visions of things that ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings,
and so they died. The vulgar called them drunkards.

I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
young girl's face produces on me. It is akin to those influences a
friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain
voices. I cannot translate