tter to-morrow; I would call again in a week. I assured
her that I understood the case. I was as well fitted to diagnose the
diseases of the Queen of some purple planet which the telescope has not
yet given to astronomy.

I have said that I found it impossible to be irritable to my dear wife.
I cannot tell the precise time when it became possible. When does the
dawn become the day upon the summer sky? When does the high tide begin
to turn beneath the August moon? Rather, I might say, when does the
blue become the violet, within the prism? Did I love her the less,
because the distance of the worshipper had dwindled to the lover's
clasp?

I could have shot the scoffer who told me so. What then? What shall I
call that difference with which the man's love differs when he has won
the woman? Had the miracle gone out of it? God forbid.

It was no longer the marvel of the fire come down from heaven to smite
the altar. It was the comfortable miracle of the daily manna. Had my
goddess departed from her divinity, my queen from her throne, my star
from her heaven? Rather, in becoming mine she had become myself, and
if there were a loss, that loss was in my own nature. I should have
risen by reason of hers. If I descended, it was by force of my own
gravitation. Her wing was too light to carry me.

It is easier to philosophize about these things than it is to record
them in cold fact. With shame and sorrow do I say it, but say it I
must: My love went the way of the love of other men who feel (this was
and remains the truth) far less than I. I, who had believed myself to
love like no other before me, and none to come after me, and I, who had
won the dearest woman in all the world--I stooped to suffer myself to
grow used to my blessedness, like any low man who was incapable of
winning or of wearing it.

It cannot be said, it shall not be said, that I loved my wife less than
the day I married her. It must be written that I became accustomed to
my happiness.

That ideal of myself, which my ideal of her created in me, and which no
emergency of fate could have shaken, slipped in the old, fatal
quicksand of use. Our ideal of ourselves is to our highest life like
the heart to the pulsation. It is the divinest art of the love of
woman for man that she clasps him to his vision of himself, as breath
and being are held together.

Until the time mentioned at the beginning of my narrative, I had in no
sense appreciate