blin
boy? The hatefulness of it all stands between me and my thoughts of you. I
cannot harden myself yet for a while to dream of pure beauty. I read your
letter over and over, but its sweet medicament cannot purge my breast. Not
even the acknowledgment of your love can drown these sighs I have heard.

XXIII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. PHILIP TOWERS:

You lack the proper ethical pose of a Father Confessor. I have
excommunicated you. The charge against you is that you take an audacious
advantage of the confessional, not to bless me, but to rejoice in my
romantic vagrancy. For a man giving himself airs in the "upper chamber,"
you have very human ways, and I begin to suspect you only keep your creed
and philosophy up there.

But you are greatly mistaken if you think you can ever wheedle me into
such a sunrise attic. I can be domesticated, but not etherealised. And you
hold strange doctrines for an ascetic. You think that because I love it
will be easy to "confiscate" my will. Even _I_ know better than that. We
live to conquer our hearts. There is no freedom of mind and spirit till
that decisive battle has been fought and won. My heart is a gay vagabond,
ready to dance before the door of your tent, but my will is better
disciplined. It weighs and counts the costs and rejects this sentimental
bargain, because, O Stranger to my soul, I doubt if you can pay the
interest love demands upon so large an investment. There is not enough of
you; and your capital consists in something less vital,--in wind-cooled
philosophies, and the passions of an occult spirit ever ready to escape
into mysticism. Why will you not be content with a companionship on this
basis? You keep your wings and you wish mine also. Well, you shall not
have them! I have no disposition to simulate the example of those small
insects who come out in early spring with splendid wings, make one flight
far enough through the sunlight to lose them, and crawl all the remainder
of their days in the domestic dust of their little tenements.

Besides, does not the science of biology teach that romantic love, in the
very nature of things, is transient?--a little heathen angel that we
entertain unawares, who comes and goes at will? I cannot tell you what
satisfaction and what distress that theory has caused me of late. I would
have my own heart free, but I am willing to move my little heaven and
earth to prolong your bondage. Selfish?--I know, but consider upon