no enquiry for what purpose these envelopes were needed.

To me of course Mary wrote without restraint. All her letters to me were
destroyed after our crisis, but some of mine to her she kept for many
years; at last they came back to me so that I have them now. And for all
their occasional cheapness and crudity, I do not find anything in them
to be ashamed of. They reflect, they are chiefly concerned with that
search for a career of fine service which was then the chief
preoccupation of my mind, the bias is all to a large imperialism, but it
is manifest that already the first ripples of a rising tide of criticism
against the imperialist movement had reached and were exercising me. In
one letter I am explaining that imperialism is not a mere
aggressiveness, but the establishment of peace and order throughout half
the world. "We may never withdraw," I wrote with all the confidence of a
Foreign Secretary, "from all these great territories of ours, but we
shall stay only to raise their peoples ultimately to an equal
citizenship with ourselves." And then in the same letter: "and if I do
not devote myself to the Empire what else is there that gives anything
like the same opportunity of a purpose in life." I find myself in
another tolerantly disposed to "accept socialism," but manifestly
hostile to "the narrow mental habits of the socialists." The large note
of youth! And in another I am clearly very proud and excited and a
little mock-modest over the success of my first two speeches in the
Union.

On the whole I like the rather boyish, tremendously serious young man of
those letters. An egotist, of course, but what youth was ever anything
else? I may write that much freely now, for by this time he is almost as
much outside my personality as you or my father. He is the young
Stratton, one of a line. I like his gravity; if youth is not grave with
all the great spectacle of life opening at its feet, then surely no age
need be grave. I love and envy his simplicity and honesty. His sham
modesty and so forth are so translucent as scarcely to matter. It is
clear I was opening my heart to myself as I opened it to Mary. I wasn't
acting to her. I meant what I said. And as I remember her answers she
took much the same high tone with me, though her style of writing was
far lighter than mine, more easy and witty and less continuous. She
flashed and flickered. As for confessed love-making there is very
little,--I find at the end of one of