n, that I do not think there is a woman
in the world who is not capable of inspiring true and abiding love in
the heart of some man. Besides, Hester to me looms up as a heroine. Not
a hair's breadth of what I know of her that is not beautiful. My regret
is that she, who could be "a vision eterne," should be doomed to receive
episodically your considerate affection. She does not know your
programme. She is a girl who takes your love for granted in the same
way as she gives hers, without niggardliness. It is the woman who cannot
be content with less than all that is slowly starved to death on a
bread-and-water diet and who does not find it out until the end.

Until the carnival time when you and Hester come to love each other, if
that time is to be, you two must be as separate in deed as you are in
fact. Forgive me and write soon.

Yours ever,
DANE.

XVII

FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON

THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
April 2, 19--.

So you have met Hester's brother? Well, I have had an outing with
Hester. She loves me well, I know, and I cannot but confess a thrill at
the thought. On the other hand, well do I know the significance of that
love, the significance and the cause. Notwithstanding that wonderful
soul of hers, she is in no wise constituted differently from her
millions of sisters on the planet to-day. She loves--she knows not why;
she knows--only that she loves. In other words, she does not reason her
emotions.

But let us reason, we men, after the manner of men. And be thou patient,
Dane, and follow me down and under the phenomena of love to things
sexless and loveless. And from there, as the proper point of departure,
let us return and chart love, its phases and occurrences, from its first
beginnings to its last manifestations.

Things sexless and loveless! Yes, and as such may be classed the drops
of life known as unicellular organisms. Such a creature is a tiny cell,
capable of performing in itself all the functions of life. That one
pulsating morsel of matter is invested with an irritability which, as
Herbert Spencer says, enables it "to adjust the inner relations with
outer relations," to correspond to its environment--in short, to live.
That single cell contracts and recoils from the things in its
environment uncongenial to its constitution, and the things congenial it
draws to itself and absorbs. It has no mouth, no stomach, no alimentary
canal. It is all mouth, all stomach, al