ou have read this as a friend, I wonder--a
candid, uncritical, understanding friend? Let me hope it, dear lady."

I was expecting the third letter when it came--but not until it did
come did I realize what my disappointment would have been if it had
not. After that every week brought me a letter; soon those letters
were the greatest interest in my life. I had given up all attempts to
solve the mystery of their coming and was content to enjoy them for
themselves alone. From week to week I looked forward to them with an
eagerness that I would hardly confess, even to myself.

And such letters as they were, growing longer and fuller and freer as
time went on--such wise, witty, brilliant, pungent letters,
stimulating all my torpid life into tingling zest! I had begun to
look abroad in my small world for worthy work and found plenty to do.
My unknown friend evidently kept track of my expanding efforts, for he
commented and criticized, encouraged and advised freely. There was a
humour in his letters that I liked; it leavened them with its sanity
and reacted on me most wholesomely, counteracting many of the morbid
tendencies and influences of my life. I found myself striving to live
up to the writer's ideal of philosophy and ambition, as pictured,
often unconsciously, in his letters.

They were an intellectual stimulant as well. To understand them fully
I found it necessary to acquaint myself thoroughly with the literature
and art, the science and the politics they touched upon. After every
letter there was something new for me to hunt out and learn and
assimilate, until my old narrow mental attitude had so broadened and
deepened, sweeping out into circles of thought I had never known or
imagined, that I hardly knew myself.

They had been coming for a year before I began to reply to them. I had
often wished to do so--there were so many things I wanted to say and
discuss, but it seemed foolish to write letters that could not be
sent. One day a letter came that kindled my imagination and stirred my
heart and soul so deeply that they insistently demanded answering
expression. I sat down at my desk and wrote a full reply to it. Safe
in the belief that the mysterious friend to whom it was written would
never see it, I wrote with a perfect freedom and a total lack of
self-consciousness that I could never have attained otherwise. The
writing of that letter gave me a pleasure second only to that which
the reading of his brought. Fo