hall prescribe the letters of lovers to
their sisters and foster-fathers? Yet there are some things their
letters should be incapable of saying, and amongst them that love is not
a crisis and a rebirth, but that it is common as the commonplace, a hit
or miss affair which "shuffling" could not affect.

Barbara showed me your note to her. "Had I written like this of myself
and Earl--"

"You could not," I objected.

"Then Herbert should have been as little able to do it," she deduced
with emphasis. Here I might have told her that men and women are races
apart, but no one talks cant to Barbara. So I did not console her, and
it stands against you in our minds that on this critical occasion you
have baffled us with coldness.

An absence of six years, broken into twice by a brief few months, must
work changes. When Barbara called your letter unnatural, she forgot how
little she knows what is natural to you. She and I have been wont to
predetermine you, your character, foothold, and outlook, by--say by the
fact that you knew your Wordsworth and that you knew him without being
able to take for yourself his austere peace. Youth which lives by hope
is riven by unrest.

"I made no vows; vows were made for me,
Bond unknown to me was given
That I should be, else sinning gently,
A dedicated spirit."

That pale sunrise seen from Mt. Tamalpais and your voice vibrant to
fierceness on the "else sinning gently"--to me the splendour of rose on
piled-up ridges of mist spoke all for you, so dear have you always been.
It rested on the possible wonder of your life. It threw you into the
scintillant Dawn with an abandon meet to a son of Waring.

Tell me, do you still read your Wordsworth on your knees? I am bent with
regret for the time when your mind had no surprises for me, when the
days were flushed halcyon with my hope in you. I resent your development
if it is because of it that you speak prosaically of a prosaic marriage
and of a honeymoon simultaneous with the Degree. I think you are too
well pleased with the simultaneousness.

Yet the fact of the letter is fair. It cannot be that the soul of it is
not. Hester Stebbins is a poet. I lean forward and think it out as I
did some days ago when the news came. I conjure up the look of love. If
the woman is content (how much more than content the feeling she bounds
with in knowing you hers as she is yours), what better test that all is
well? I conjure up the l