ook of love. It is thus at meeting and thus at
parting. Even here, to-night, when all is chill and hard to understand,
I catch the flash and the warmth, and what I see restores you to me, but
how deep the plummet of my mind needed to sound before it reached you.
It is because you permitted yourself to speak when silence had expressed
you better.

Show me the ideally real Hester Stebbins, the spark of fire which is
she. The storms have not broken over her head. She will laugh and make
poetry of her laughter. If before she met you she wept, that, too, will
help the smiling. There is laughter which is the echo of a Miserere
sobbed by the ages. Men chuckle in the irony of pain, and they smile
cold, lessoned smiles in resignation; they laugh in forgetfulness and
they laugh lest they die of sadness. A shrug of the shoulders, a
widening of the lips, a heaving forth of sound, and the life is saved.
The remedy is as drastic as are the drugs used for epilepsy, which in
quelling the spasm bring idiocy to the patient. If we are made idiots
by our laughter, we are paying dearly for the privilege of continuing in
life.

Hester shall laugh because she is glad and must tell her joy, and she
will not lose it in the telling. Greet her for me and hasten to prove
yourself, for

"The Poet, gentle creature that he is,
Hath like the Lover, his unruly times;
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts."

You will judge by this letter that I am neither sick nor well, and that
I reach for a distress which is not near. If I were Merchant rather than
Poet, it would be otherwise with me.

DANE.

IV

FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON

THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
October 27, 19--.

Do I still read my Wordsworth on my knees? Well, we may as well have it
out. I have foreseen this day so long and shunned it that now I meet it
almost with extended hands. No, I do not read my Wordsworth on my knees.
My mind is filled with other things. I have not the time. I am not the
Herbert Wace of six years gone. It is fair that you should know this;
fair, also, that you should know the Herbert Wace of six years gone was
not quite the lad you deemed him.

There is no more pathetic and terrible thing than the prejudice of love.
Both you and I have suffered from it. Six years ago, ay, and before
that, I felt and resented the growing difference betwe