anding of my sacred hunger, a comprehension of my
desolation, a realization that my efforts to fill my time with work
were as the efforts of a traveller in a forest to escape from the wolves
whose voices he hears behind him. I needed the recognition of a simple
truth--that the thing one is passionately eager to give is nearly always
the thing one is passionately eager to receive, and that when I poured
forth sympathy upon others I was longing to have it poured forth upon
me. I gave because secretly I realized the hunger I was sharing. And
often, having satisfied your hunger, I was left to starve, no longer in
company, but entirely alone.

"I needed great things, perhaps, but I needed them expressed in
little ways; and I needed little cares, little attentions, little
thoughtfulnesses, little preventions, little, little, absurd kindnesses,
tendernesses, recognitions, forgivenesses. Perhaps, indeed, even more
than anything magnificent or great, I needed the so-called little
things. It is not enough for a woman to know that a man would do for
her something important, something even superb, if the occasion for it
arose. Such an occasion probably never would arise--and she cannot wait.
She wants to be shown at every moment that some one is thinking kindly
of her, is making little, kind plots and plans for her, is wishing to
ward off from her the chill winds, to keep from pricking her the thorns
of the roses, to shut out from her the shadows of life and let in the
sunbeams to her pathway.

"I needed the tender, passing touch to show me my secret grief was
understood, and my inconsistency was pardoned. I needed the generous
smile to prove to me that my greed for kindness, even when perhaps
inopportune, was met in an ungrudging spirit. I needed now and then--I
needed this sometimes terribly, more, perhaps, than any other thing--a
sacrifice of some very small, very personal desire of yours, because it
was not mine or because it was opposite to mine. Never, never, did my
heart and my nature demand of yours any great sacrifice of self, such
as mine could have made--such as mine once did make--for you. But it did
demand, often--often it demanded some small sacrifice: the giving up of
some trifle, the resignation of some advantage, perhaps, that your man's
intellect gave you over my woman's intellect, the abandoning of
some argumentative position, or the not taking of it, the sweet
pretence--scarcely a sin against the Holy Ghost of