not restlessness, but the love of the open. I am
fain to leave a walled house, and, better still, to get outside of the
walls within and join the city in friendship and let the city join me. I
never feel greater fellowship than when I walk--

Except when I write to you. Then do I greaten with the pride of life. My
sympathies quicken and I grow young again. I constitute myself advocate
of the world, and enthusiasm does not fail me in this high calling. It
is but natural that in the face of scepticism which I cannot share I
should feel greater faith, that in the face of revilement a sense of the
glory of the thing belittled should settle upon me. I turn zealot and
spend myself in long-drawn praising. I lay myself under a spell of
harmony because I am serving and defending and approving what I hold to
be good.

So when you insist that romantic love is pre-nuptial and that it dies at
marriage as others suppose it to die at the approach of poverty, I grow
glad with the knowledge that this is not true. I scrutinize facts which
I hitherto took for granted, and become doubly sure. You dogmatise when
you say that the lover and the husband are mutually exclusive. If there
was love in the beginning, it will be at the end. Love doubles upon
itself. Propinquity tightens bonds and there is a steady blossoming of
the character in a radiant atmosphere. The marriages that fail are the
unions which are based on liking. In these, weariness must set in, for
marriage demands that men and women be all in all to each other, and
unless it be so with them, the lives of the "contracting parties" are,
by the laws of logic, and by the force of the laws of delicacy in the
art of living, forever spoilt.

Yes, and people who truly love come to regret their married love, these
too. But these have at least begun well. Their lives are infinitely
richer for this fact. Their failure itself is made by it more bearable
than the failure of those others who act the vulgarian and demand so
little of life that even that little escapes them. No world-stains on
these who are, at least, would-be lovers. They stand mistaken but
irreproachable. It was neither their fault nor love's, and "life more
abundant" comes to them even with the mistake.

You are consistent. Just as you maintain that love is passion, so do you
think that it is no more than a preliminary thrill. You note a change;
the flutter and the excitement felt in the presence of the unknown go,
and y