say that I do not know you, I can only reply--Why of course I don't,
and neither do you. You find your own self out little by little--why
get angry with me because I don't know it until you tell me? You are
a grown woman compared to what you were three months ago; and this
character that you ask me to know--well, it takes years of hard
labor to prove a character.

XIV

Dearest Corydon:

Do you ever realize how much _faith_ in you I have? As utterly
different is your whole life, as if you had been in another world;
and through all the wilderness that I have travelled, I hope to drag
you. But I cannot carry you, or take you; I must trust in the frenzy
of your grip upon me. There is nothing else you could have that I
would trust. You might be wonderfully clever and wonderfully
wise--and I could do nothing with you. Do you remember Beethoven's
saying, that he would like to take a certain woman, if he had time,
and marry her and break her heart, so that she might be able to
sing?

Ah dear heart, I wish you could read in my words what I feel! I
wonder if I am dreaming when I live in this ideal of what a woman's
love can be--so complete and so utter a surrender, so complete a
forgetting, a losing of the self, so complete a living in another
heart! I am not afraid to ask just this from a woman--from you! For
I have enough heart's passion to satisfy every thirst that you may
feel. Ah, Corydon, I want you! I am drunk with the thought of
_making_ a woman to love. I wonder if any man ever thought of that