I turned over for the signature, and found my own mother's. Was it not a

strange sweet meeting? And only then did the memory of her handwriting

from far back come to me. She died, dear Highness, before I was seven

years old. I love her as I do my early memory of flowers, as something

very sweet, hardly as a real person.

I noticed she loved best in men and women what they lack most often: in a

man, a fair mind; in a woman, courage. "Brave women and fair men," she

wrote. Byron might have turned in his grave at having his dissolute

stiff-neck so wrung for him by misquotation. And she--it must have been

before the eighties had started the popular craze for him--chose Meredith,

my own dear Meredith, for her favorite author. How our tastes would have

run together had she lived!

Well, I know you fair, and believe myself brave--constitutionally, so

that I can't help it: and this, therefore, is not self-praise. But

fairness in a man is a deadly hard acquirement, I begin now to discover.

You have it fixed fast in you.

You, I think, began to do just things consciously, as the burden of

manhood began in you. I love to think of you growing by degrees till you

could carry your head so--and no other way; so that, looking at you, I

can promise myself you never did a mean thing, and never consciously an

unjust thing except to yourself. I can just fancy that fault in you.

But, whatever--I love you for it more and more, and am proud knowing you

and finding that we are to become friends. For it is that, and no less

than that, now.

I love you; and me you like cordially: and that is enough. I need not

look behind it, for already I have no way to repay you for the happiness

this brings me.

I.

Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear; and it takes long thinking. Not

merely such a quantity of thought, but such a quality, makes so hard a

day's work that by the end of it I am quite drowsy. Bless me, dearest; all

to-day has belonged to you; and to-morrow, I know, waits to become yours

without the asking: just as without the asking I too am yours. I wish it

were more possible for us to give service to those we love. I am most glad

because I see you so often: but I come and go in your life empty-handed,

though I have so much to give away. Thoughts, the best I have, I give you:

I cannot empty my brain of them. Some day you shall think well of me.--That

is a vow, dear friend,--you whom I love so much!




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