or must be, or ought
to be. That's my secret. I can't always share it, or at any rate share
it all, even with the person I love. But neither can I say what it is,
or isn't, or should be, or must be, for you. You have your secret. No
two people love in the same way, or get precisely the same kind of joy
or sorrow from loving. Since love is the flower of personality, it has
the same infinite variety that personalities possess. We give one thing
and we get back another. Do not some of our irritations--I'm not
speaking of you and me in particular--arise from the fact that, giving
one thing, we expect to get the same thing back, when all the while no
one else has that special quality to offer? The flower is different
according to the plant that produces it. When the pine-tree loved the
palm there was more than the distance to make the one a mystery to the
other.

"Of the two things essential to love, the first, so it seems to me, is
that what one gives should be one's best--the very blossom of one's
soul. It may have the hot luxuriance of the hibiscus, or the flame of
the wild azalea in the woods, or no more than the mildly scented,
flowerless bloom of the elm or the linden that falls like manna in the
roadway. Each has its beauties and its limitations; but it is worth
noticing that each serves its purpose in life's infinite profusion as
nothing else could serve it to that particular end. The elm lends
something to the hibiscus--the hibiscus to the elm. Neither can expect
back what it gives to the other. Perfection is accomplished when each
offers what it can.

"Which brings me to the remaining thing I know about love--that it
exists in offering. Love is the desire to go outward, to pour forth, to
express, to do, to contribute. It has no system of calculation and no
yard-stick for the little more or the little less. It is spontaneous and
irrepressible and overflowing, and loses the extraordinary essence that
makes it truly love when it weighs and measures and inspects too closely
the quality of its return. It is in the fact that love is its own
sufficiency, its own joy, its own compensation for all its pain, that I
find it divine. The one point on which I can fully accept your Christian
theology is that your God is love. Given a God who is Love and a Love
that is God, I can see Him as worthy to be worshiped. Call Him, then, by
any name you please--Jehovah, Allah, Krishna, Christ--you still have the
Essence, the _Thing_. L