letters; I will define, not defend, myself. You fall out with me because I
am a dilettante (or many words to that one effect), and you abuse me
because I deal in the form rather than the matter of love. Is that not
just to you?

In short, I am not as your other admirers, and the variation in the
species has lost the charm of novelty.

Believe me that I am honest to-day, at least; indeed, I think you will
understand. Only the college boy who feeds on Oscar Wilde and sentimental
pessimism has that disease of indifference with which you crudely charge
me. It is a kind of chicken-pox, cousin-French to the evils of literary
Paris. But I must not thank God too loudly, or you will think I am one
with them at heart.

No, I am in earnest, in terrible earnest, about all this--I mean life and
what to do with it. That is a great day when a man comes into his own, no
matter how paltry the pittance may be the gods have given him--when he
comes to know just how far he can go, and where lies his path of least
resistance. That I know. I am tremendously sure of myself now, and, like
your good business men, I go about my affairs and dispose of my life with
its few energies in a cautious, economical way.

What is all this I make so much to-do about? Very little, I confess, but
to me more serious than L's and sky-scrapers; yes, than love. Mine is an
infinite labor: first to shape the true tool, and then to master the
material! I grant you I may die any day like a rat on a housetop, with
only a bundle of musty papers, the tags of broken conversations, and one
or two dead, distorted nerves. That is our common risk. But I shall
accomplish as much of the road as God permits the snail, and I shall have