e wisdom in
loving a tree man, who may shelter you, but never can be like you in life
or love?" Always his arms are stretched upward to the heavens in a prayer
to be nearer to the light. He is a sort of divine savage who cannot
remember the earth heart that may love and die beneath him like the leaves
upon the ground. Thus we came out of the wood, you who are made so that
you can never really understand what you have lost, and I, with all my
will in my wings, and stronger for the loss of my heart. Some day,
perhaps, if I keep the wings, it will return, a little withered, but sound
as a brownie's. Then, dear man of the trees, I shall bury it here in the
forest like a precious seed. Who knows what it may come to be, my poor
heart that was dead and shall live again,--a tall lady-tree as heartless
as any man-oak, or only a poor vine!

XIX

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

Imagine if you can the moral perversity of a young woman who never regrets
a witty deception or a graceful subterfuge, but repents sometimes in
sackcloth and ashes for her truth-telling. I'd give half my forest now to
have back the letter I sent you yesterday. But since I cannot recall it, I
wish you to bear in mind that what was true of a woman's heart yesterday,
to-day may be only a little breach of sentiment with which to reproach her
prudence. We are never lastingly true. The best you can expect is that we
be generally true to the mood we are in.

When you were here, I could not beguile you into a discussion of the
subject upon which we differ so widely. Pardon the malicious reference,
but it seemed to me that you had closed the door of your "upper chamber"
and hastened down here to confess your own reality. And no challenge,
however ingenious, could provoke you into displaying the cloven hoof of
your "higher nature." When my father, for instance, who has long suspected
the soundness of your doctrines, laid down one of his lurid hell-fire
premises as an active reason for seeking salvation, I observed that you
showed the agility of a spiritual acrobat in avoiding the conflict.

Nevertheless, I return to the point of divergence between us. You are
angry with the humanitarians for their materialism. But you forget who the
Hull-House classes are,--people so poor and starved and cold that their
very souls have perished. You cannot teach your little goblin-faced boy
who sits under the bridge the philosophy of the Hindu ascetic until you