o you?

"I beg of you not to believe that I forgot, or did not keep turning in
thought to my friend, in those long days and nights when I hadn't time
to write, or couldn't risk the rustle of a sheet of paper, or the
scratch of a pen. I thought of you constantly, especially in the night
when I sat beside mother, not daring to stir or draw a long breath if
she slept. I reviewed all the past, since August 18th, 1914, and as if
I had been an outsider, saw myself as I was before I read your
book--before I wrote to you, and gained your friendship for my strong
prop.

"I was a child in those days. I couldn't face grief and realize that it
must be borne. All the small, dear, warm, cushiony things of life as I
had lived it, seemed the only ones which ought to be real. I clung to
them. I wanted to shut out sorrow and hide away from it by drawing
rose-colored blinds across my windows. I was a shivering creature who
had been caught in a sleety rain and soaked through to the skin. I ran
home out of the sleet, thinking to pull those rose-colored curtains and
put on dry clothes and warm myself at the fire. But the curtains had
been ripped away. There were no dry clothes, and no fire. There was no
help or comfort anywhere. The world marched in an army against me. Only
misery was real; in vain to writhe away from it; it was everywhere.
Horror and anguish poured through me, as water pours into a leaking
ship. My soul was withering in the cold. The bulwarks of my character
were beaten down. Then you came into my life. You didn't give me back
my rose-colored curtains to hide the face of sorrow, but you taught me
how to look into sorrow's eyes, and find beauty and wonder beyond
anything I had ever known. You let me creep into a temple you had
built, and learn great truths which you had found out through your own
suffering. I knew you had written your book with your heart's blood, or
you couldn't have made my heart fill with life and beat again. You
couldn't have reached me where I was cowering, far, far below
tear-level.

"Even when I could see by your letters that you hadn't quite been able
to shake off chains of depression from yourself, you had the power to
release others. What a splendid power! Did you realize that you had it,
when you wrote your book, I wonder?

"You showed me what to do with the strange forces I could feel blindly
groping in my soul. You showed me that philosophy shouldn't be a brew
of poppies to drown regrets, b