re
considerate than usual to me--I bethought me that perchance a Friend is at
times a trifle too circumspect in his words, a trifle too circumscribed in
his actions. He must be seemly in his carriage and speech, must not allow
unbecoming emotion to prey upon him, must build the body from the spirit,
and not the spirit from the body. I had tried to do all these, and yet
there were times when sensation overpowered calculation, and it would have
afforded me peace to have held friend Barbara within my arms and said many
foolish and irrelevant words, and heard such words from her. Sometimes it
seems to me that three feet apart, two feet, one, two inches, one, is too
much from one who is exceedingly much to us: the mere touch of hand to
hand, unmeaning as such a thing is, may be infinitely more than a mere
gratification of sense. Still, I would not have it understood that I am a
militant spirit, fond of what stubborn folk term "progression," nor would
I throw aside any of the rules which have been mine and those of many
generations of ancestors who followed George Fox and knew his intents to
be pure withal.

But I was to go away East now, and my preparations were completed.

"I hope thee will bear in mind that I shall often think of thee, friend
Barbara," I said on the last evening I should see her for a long time.

The dints in her face looked very comely as she answered, "I shall, friend
Biddle."

"And thee will think of me?"

"I always do," she said. And yet this was not what I had much desired,
although I must perforce be contented. I knew, though, that distance would
only make her closer to me in spirit, and that I should be kinder to all
women for her sake--that I should pity all helplessness for her sake; for
where the mind inclineth most favorably, where gentleness and sweetness
for another is borne in upon us, we invariably associate that other with a
sort of tender helplessness which can only be made into perfect strength
by ourselves. And then I had grown to have a species of fear for Barbara:
it was as though she were greater than I, although I could reason down
this foolish ebullition in the calm knowledge that the Lord made all
beings equal. Mayhaps, had I been assured in my mind that she should not
only think of me from necessity, arising out of our long companionship
and near relation, but that she should _care_ well to call to mind my
absent form and features and voice and presence, and her own want of me