time, for you bear
them no loyalty. Calfdom and whelpage, vagaries of adolescence, you call
them. You do not show them much respect! For this reason your examples
lose what weight they might have borne. They belong so wholly to the
past, they are mere wraiths of bygone stirrings, they cannot clothe you
with knowledge of love. Cold now, what boots it that you have been
afire? You cannot be taught by what is utterly over.

You are catching what I aim to say, I hope, for I aim to say much. Put
it that instead of a girl whom you idealised, it was a principle--some
scheme of reform which you honoured with all the passion of young hope
and dream, and which knit your alert being into a Laocoon of striving.
Your maturer eyes see this ideal impossible and narrow. In no wise can
it satisfy your bolder reach and larger sympathy. But you do not laugh
at what has been. If you strove for it sincerely at any time, no matter
how remote, you could never again deride it. Because once you loved it
you are eternal keeper of the key to its good. What has been wholly
yours you never quite desert. Nothing has remained to you of your
love-affairs, therefore your recital of them is empty of meaning. If you
were in love to-day, and because of your philosophy you determined to do
battle with your feeling, your experience would be more authoritative.

You have known love, and having known you refuse it. Henceforth, it must
be reason and not feeling. "What is your objection?" you ask. This
merely, that the thing cannot be. Marriage to be marriage must come
through love, through the reddest romance of love, through fire of the
spirit, yes, even through the love of calfdom and whelpage. Else it is a
mockery. Where is the woman of character who would sell the be-all and
end-all of her existence for a neat catalogue of possible advantages?
Where is the man who would frankly and without embellishment dare make
such proposal? You point to yourself. But you have never explained
yourself to Hester, and even to me you are embellishing the matter with
all the might in your persuasive pen.

The ardours of calfdom and whelpage that you smile at I would have you
throb with. You underrate the firstlings of the heart, the rose and
white blossoming, the call upon the senses and the readiness to respond
and to fulfil, to give and to take, to be and make happy--the great
pride and utter abandon which is young love. At fifteen, fortunately for
the development of mi