unto itself and its full tale had been told. Good-night. It is so hard
to take my hands off writing to you, and worry on at the same exercise
in another direction. I kiss you more times than I can count: it is
almost really you that I kiss now! My very dearest, my own sweetheart,
whom I so worship. Good-night! "Good-afternoon" sounds too funny: is
outside our vocabulary altogether. While I live, I must love you more
than I know!




LETTER VII.


My Friend: Do you think this a cold way of beginning? I do not: is it not
the true send-off of love? I do not know how men fall in love: but I could
not have had that come-down in your direction without being your friend
first. Oh, my dear, and after, after; it is but a limitless friendship I
have grown into!

I have heard men run down the friendships of women as having little true
substance. Those who speak so, I think, have never come across a real
case of woman's friendship. I praise my own sex, dearest, for I know
some of their loneliness, which you do not: and until a certain date
their friendship was the deepest thing in life I had met with.

For must it not be true that a woman becomes more absorbed in friendship
than a man, since friendship may have to mean so much more to her, and
cover so far more of her life, than it does to the average man? However
big a man's capacity for friendship, the beauty of it does not fill his