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efforts which won from me eventually a greater respect for your powers
and for secret forgiveness which ended in open petting. When I prepared
the pedestal you were quite ready to mount it, and to remain upon it
without any demonstration of fatigue.

"And so many needs of mine you satisfied.

"But I had more needs, and far other needs, than these.

"I needed not only to make many gifts, to satisfy my passion for
generosity, but to have many gifts, and gifts of a special nature, made
in return to me. I needed to feel another often, if not perpetually and
exclusively, intent on me. I needed to feel tenderness--watchful, quick,
eager tenderness, not tenderness slow-footed and in blinkers--round
about me.

"I needed a little blindness in my friend. That is true. But the
blindness that I needed was not blindness to my little sacrifices, but
blindness to my little faults.

"To a woman there is such a world of difference between the two!
I longed for my friend to see the smoke ascending from my small
burnt-offerings of self made for his sake. But I longed, too, for him
not always to see with calm, clear eyes my petty failings, my minute
vanities, my inconsistencies, my incongruities, my frequent lack
of reasoning power and logical sequence, my gusts of occasional
injustice--ending nearly always in a rain of undue benefits--my surely
forgivable follies of sentiment, my irritabilities--how often due to
physical causes which no man could ever understand!--my blunders of
the head--of the heart I made but few, or none--my weak depressions,
struggled against but not always conquered, my perhaps childish
anxieties and apprehensions, my forebodings, not invariably well
founded, my fleeting absurdities of temper, of temperament, of manner,
or of word.

"But as definitely as my friend did not see my little sacrifices he saw
my little faults, and he made me see that he saw them. Men are so free
from the tender deceits that women are compact of.

"And as I needed blindness in some directions, in others I needed clear
sight.

"I needed some one to see that my woman's heart was not only the heart
of a happy mother, to whom God had given an almost perfect child, but
also the heart of a lover--not of a _grande amoureuse_, perhaps, but
of a lover who had been deprived of the love that is the complement of
woman's, and who suffered perpetually in woman's peculiar and terrible
way because of that deprivation.

"I needed an underst