human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called "parted
presence!" The man must go forth to his labour until the evening. How
few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their
whole lives to each other really give! Husband and wife even must be
content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day.
As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so
strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of
the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together:

Your heart is never away,
But ever with mine, forever,
Forever without endeavour,
Tomorrow, love, as today;
Two blent hearts never astray,
Two souls no power may sever,
Together, O my love, forever!

When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked
the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly
fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the
comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between
Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the
ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say
the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist
only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our
lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and
the dead--who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought
near.

I have a friend who is dead--but I say to myself that he is in New