ready to take you at
your word, and thank your stars, too, that I am not a free woman who
would be foolish enough and selfish enough to harness a young husband to
a mature wife. I know you resent this reference to the difference in our
years, which may not be so marked to the observer to-day, but how would
it be ten, fifteen years from now? There are few disasters greater for
husband or wife than the marriage of a boy of twenty to a woman a dozen
years his senior. For when he reaches thirty-five, despair and misery
must almost inevitably face them both.

You must forgive me when I tell you that one sentence in your letter
caused a broad smile.

That sentence was, "Would to God I had met you when you were free to be
wooed and loved, as never man loved woman before."

Now I have been married ten years, and you are twenty-three years old!
You must blame my imagination (not my heart, which has no intention of
being cruel) for the picture presented to my mind's eye by your wish.

I saw myself in the full flower of young ladyhood, carrying at my side
an awkward lad of a dozen years, attired in knickerbockers, and
probably chewing a taffy stick, yet "wooing and loving as never man
loved before."

I suppose, however, the idea in your mind was that you wished Fate had
made me of your own age, and left me free for you.

But few boys of twenty-three are capable of knowing what they want in a
life companion. Ten years from now your ideal will have changed.

You are in love with love, life, and all womankind, my dear boy, not
with me, your friend.

Put away all such ideas, and settle down to hard study and serious
ambitions, and seal this letter of yours, which I am returning with my
reply, and lay it carefully away in some safe place. Mark it to be
destroyed unopened in case of your death. But if you live, I want you to
open, re-read and burn it on the evening before your marriage to some
lovely girl, who is probably rolling a hoop to-day; and if I am living,
I want you to write and thank me for what I have said to you here. I
hardly expect you will feel like doing it now, but I can wait.

Do not write me again until that time, and when we meet, be my good
sensible friend--one I can introduce to my husband, for only such
friends do I care to know.

To Miss Winifred Clayborne

_At Vassar College_

My dear niece:--It was a pleasure to receive so long a letter from you
after almost two years of silence. It hardl