been popular in the South since the war. There is hauteur in my
omission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with far
more vigour without _g_'s or _r_'s than you of the North can with them.
For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where is
Jack?

XXIX

PHILIP TO JESSICA

KIND MADAM:

Yes, a little more than kind, dear Jessica, for you have put into my grasp
the flower of perfect delight, and "my hand retains a little breath of
sweet." You have opened a window into my heart and poured through it the
warmth and golden glory of your own sunlight. I am filled with a
joyousness of a new spring--and yet there is something in your letter that
makes me a little sad. You express so frankly that reserve of resentment,
even of bitterness, which always, I think, abides with a woman in all the
sweetness of her love, but which with most women never comes to entire
consciousness. Listen, dear Heart, while I talk to you of yourself and
myself, until we comprehend each other better. It is so much easier for me
to understand you than for you to understand me, because a woman's nature
is single, whereas a man's is double, and in this duality lies all the
reason of that enmity of the sexes which draws us together yet still holds
us asunder.

You complain of my letter because I argue a philosophical proposition in
it while pleading for love. Do you not know that this is man's way? And I
would not try to deceive you: this philosophical proposition, which seems
to you almost a matter of indifference, is more to me than everything else
in the world. For it I could surrender all my heart's hope; for it I could
sacrifice my own person; even, if the choice were necessary, which cannot
be, I might sacrifice you. There is this duality in man's nature. The
ambition of his intellect, the passion, it may be, to force upon the world
some vision of his imagination or some theorem of his brain, works in him
side by side with his personal being, and the two are never quite fused.
Can you not recall a score of examples in history of men who have led this
dual existence? You reviewed for me Bismarck's Love Letters and were
yourself struck by this sharp contrast between the iron determination of
the man in public affairs and the softness and sweetness of his domestic
life. That is but one case in point of the eternal dualism in masculine
nature which a woman can never comprehend, and which always, if it
con