neliness and her
sorrow is the imagined embrace, the awaited warm, close pressure of the
hands, the fancied gaze. What does it mean? What secret was there for
Leonardo in Mona Lisa's smile, what for him in the motion of waters? You
cannot explain the bloom, the charm, the smile of life, that which rains
sunshine into our hearts, which tells us we are wise to hope and to have
faith, which buckles on us an armour of activity, which lights the fires
of the spirit, which gives us Godhead and renders us indomitable.
Comparative anatomy cannot reason it down. It is sensibility, romance,
idea. It is a fact of life toward which all other facts make. For the
flush of rose-light in the heavens, the touch of a hand, the colour and
shape of fruit, the tears that come for unnamed sorrows, the regrets of
old men, are more significant than all the building and inventing done
since the first social compact.

Forgive my tediousness. I have flaunted these truisms before you in
order to exorcise that modern slang of yours which is more false than
the overstrained forms of a feudal France. To shut out glory is not to
be practical. You are not adjusting your life artistically; there is too
much strain, too little warmth, too much self-complacence. I see that
you are really younger than I thought. The world never censures the
crimes of the spirit. You are safe from the world's tongue lashings, and
in that safety is the danger against which my friendship warns you.

I have been reading Hester's poems, and I know that she is like them,
nervous, vibrant, throbbing, sensitive. I have been reading your
letters, and I think her soul will escape yours. If you have not love
like hers, you have nothing with which to keep her. This I have
undertaken to say to you. It is a strange role, yet conventional. I am
the father whose matrimonial whims are not met by the son. The stock
measure is to disinherit. But the cause of our quarrel is somewhat
unusual, and I can be neither so practical nor so vulgar as to set about
making codicils. Love is of no value to financiers; there is no bank for
it nor may it be made over in a will. Rather is it carried on in the
blood, even as Barbara carried it on into the life of her girl-babe.
Your sister keeps me strong with the faith of love. May God be good to
her! It was five years ago that she came to me and whispered, "Earl."
When she saw I could not turn to her in joy, she leaned her little head
back against the rose