ger possible in my experience. The
great Change has come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our
atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men. None
would dare to dream of returning to the sorrows of the former time,
and yet that misery was pierced, ever and again its gray curtain was
stabbed through and through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions
of a keenness that it seems to me are now altogether gone out
of life. Is it the Change, I wonder, that has robbed life of its
extremes, or is it perhaps only this, that youth has left me--even
the strength of middle years leaves me now--and taken its despairs
and raptures, leaving me judgment, perhaps, sympathy, memories?

I cannot tell. One would need to be young now and to have been
young then as well, to decide that impossible problem.

Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found little
beauty in our grouping. I have our two photographs at hand in this
bureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fitting
ready-made clothing, and Nettie--Indeed Nettie is badly dressed,
and her attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see her
through the picture, and her living brightness and something of
that mystery of charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind.
Her face has triumphed over the photographer--or I would long ago
have cast this picture away.

The reality of beauty yields itself to no words. I wish that I had
the sister art and could draw in my margin something that escapes
description. There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There was
something, a matter of the minutest difference, about her upper
lip so that her mouth closed sweetly and broke very sweetly to a
smile. That grave, sweet smile!

After we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents for awhile
of the irrevocable choice we had made, the time came for us to part,
shyly and before others, and I and my mother went off back across
the moonlit park--the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer--to
the railway station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement in
Clayton, and I saw no more of Nettie--except that I saw her in my
thoughts--for nearly a year. But at our next meeting it was decided
that we must correspond, and this we did with much elaboration
of secrecy, for Nettie would have no one at home, not even her
only sister, know of her attachment. So I had to send my precious
documents sealed and under cover by way of a confidential s