sion leaping
mountain-high.... In the last letter she said: "Come back to me.... I
miss you as the rose misses the honey from her heart ... as the stem
misses the gathered flower.... I crave you as a sail might crave the
wild wind that gives it life. Dear ... my dearest.... I know now why the
'wisdom of men is foolishness to God.'... God is Love ... my wisdom is
foolishness to Love.... So I give you my foolish wisdom for a carpet
under your feet. And my wise foolishness I give you for a seal upon your
heart.... But myself I cannot give you, for I was yours when Love spread
the foundations of the world...."

For she had found when Loring was far from her that "her heart was
within him." She found the plain, wheaten bread of Philosophy dreary
fare without the honey of romance. Poetry fled from her like a wild, shy
bird, that would only come to one call. With his name she could lure it.
She wrote page after page of love-verse as a sort of bridal offering for
his return. She knew that there was madness in her mood, but it seemed a
high and holy sort of frenzy--like the spiritual dementia that sends
martyrs singing to the pyre. So she sung amid the flames that so
exquisitely consumed her. For this was not a usual passion that she felt
for Loring. She would have preferred that their love-life should be one
long, ecstatic betrothal. She would have liked to give him the flower of
love without its fruit. Yet his love was so different from all other
loves that she had known ... it was so finely winged--so woven with
adoration ... so fresh as with the dews of youth's first dawn; in her
the answering love was so immaculate, veiled with imagination as for a
first communion; all was so beautifully and perfectly harmonious between
them, that she could not imagine discord ever following on this
enchanted symphony.

And granted that their tastes were not always the same ... granted that
she was older, that he seemed but a boy to her at times--must love mean
oneness in all things? Was not oneness of heart and spirit enough? And
was not woman immemorially older than man--the first created, but not
the first conceived?--Did not the Christian faith give even God a
mother, as if Divinity itself must needs be child of the eternal
feminine?

And because the great, tender mother in her cherished Loring, the shy,
wild lover in her only loved him more.

XI

They kept their secret from every one until May.

The greatest pang that S