titudinous realities of the individual career? Surely the time is
coming for that, when a new private literature will exist, and fathers
and mothers behind their roles of rulers, protectors, and supporters,
will prepare frank and intimate records of their thought and their
feeling, told as one tells things to equals, without authority or
reserves or discretions, so that, they being dead, their children may
rediscover them as contemporaries and friends.

That desire for self-expression is indeed already almost an instinct
with many of us. Man is disposed to create a traditional wisdom. For me
this book I contemplate is a need. I am just a year and a half from a
bitter tragedy and the loss of a friend as dear as life to me. It is
very constantly in my mind. She opened her mind to me as few people open
their minds to anyone. In a way, little Stephen, she died for you. And I
am so placed that I have no one to talk to quite freely about her. The
one other person to whom I talk, I cannot talk to about her; it is
strange, seeing how we love and trust one another, but so it is; you
will understand that the better as this story unfolds. For eight long
years before the crisis that culminated in her tragic death I never saw
her; yet, quite apart from the shock and distresses of that time, it has
left me extraordinarily lonely and desolate.

And there was a kind of dreadful splendor in that last act of hers,
which has taken a great hold upon my imagination; it has interwoven with
everything else in my mind, it bears now upon every question. I cannot
get away from it, while it is thus pent from utterance.... Perhaps
having written this to you I may never show it you or leave it for you
to see. But yet I must write it. Of all conceivable persons you, when
you have grown to manhood, are the most likely to understand.

Sec. 2

You did not come to see your dead grandfather, nor did you know very
much about the funeral. Nowadays we do not bring the sweet egotisms, the
vivid beautiful personal intensities of childhood, into the cold, vast
presence of death. I would as soon, my dear, have sent your busy little
limbs toiling up the Matterhorn. I have put by a photograph of my father
for you as he lay in that last stillness of his, that you will see at a
properer time.

Your mother and I wore black only at his funeral and came back colored
again into your colored world, and in a very little while your interest
in this event that had t