ature is prone must ever provoke. Thee knows a
Friend must be seemly to all, and that alone will inform thee that I
manifested no alteration in my demeanor. And my business qualifications
were not impaired because of the uprising in my mind, for what has worldly
business to do with spiritual? I could bargain and sell to the best
advantage, be wholly consistent in all things, and be termed a man whose
feelings were so schooled that no emotion ever dared come nigh them. Thee
may think, the world may think, that suppressed emotion is annihilated
emotion: I who wear drab know differently. And the silence between friend
Barbara and myself was not a silence to be broken by useless speech: it
was too closely allied to the end of something I had been brought to think
almost eternal. I still had letter after letter from friend Hicks, which I
replied to always--letters on purely business-matters, never once touched
by so much as the name of Barbara, for she no longer sent her duty to me;
and I could but realize how stern her father must be to her at home for
her dereliction, and I--pitied her. As the weeks went by and I heard
nothing of or from her, I may safely asseverate that the cruelly weak
feeling that had oppressed me at first left me by degrees, and I could see
far clearer than before, and could perchance blame myself for having
failed to see ere this that I was what I was to her. I began to weigh the
many chances of happiness against the many certainties of unhappiness, and
I could but understand that she had with a woman's keen insight found out
easily what it had cost me so considerably to know. I could not blame her:
why should I? She had acted most fairly to me: had I done as well to her?
In friend Afton's house I fought the battle which alone Friends approve of
and sanction--the battle of the spirit against the flesh; and I conquered
well, I am assured, although I could never cease to care for friend
Barbara as I had cared for her since I had known her: it would have been
entirely inconsistent with the principles of constancy and truth which had
been so early and late imbibed by me.

I must say now that my great comfort in these times was friend Jordan;
and, odd as it may appear, the similarity of her name with that of the man
whom friend Hicks's daughter had learned to regard so highly seemed to
call her closer to me than anything else at the same season might have
done. Of evenings we would take up our old manner, an