twenty-five.

Always we were equals, or if anything she was the better of us two. I
never made love to her in the commoner sense of the word, a sense in
which the woman is conceived of as shy, unawakened, younger, more
plastic, and the man as tempting, creating responses, persuading and
compelling. We made love to each other as youth should, we were friends
lit by a passion.... I think that is the best love. If I could wish your
future I would have you love someone neither older and stronger nor
younger and weaker than yourself. I would have you have neither a toy
nor a devotion, for the one makes the woman contemptible and the other
the man. There should be something almost sisterly between you. Love
neither a goddess nor a captive woman. But I would wish you a better
fate in your love than chanced to me.

Mary was not only naturally far more quick-minded, more swiftly
understanding than I, but more widely educated. Mine was the stiff
limited education of the English public school and university; I could
not speak and read and think French and German as she could for all that
I had a pedantic knowledge of the older forms of those tongues; and the
classics and mathematics upon which I had spent the substance of my
years were indeed of little use to me, have never been of any real use
to me, they were ladders too clumsy to carry about and too short to
reach anything. My general ideas came from the newspapers and the
reviews. She on the other hand had read much, had heard no end of good
conversation, the conversation of people who mattered, had thought for
herself and had picked the brains of her brothers. Her mother had let
her read whatever books she liked, partly because she believed that was
the proper thing to do, and partly because it was so much less trouble
to be liberal in such things.

We had the gravest conversations.

I do not remember that we talked much of love, though we were very much
in love. We kissed; sometimes greatly daring we walked hand in hand;
once I took her in my arms and carried her over a swampy place beyond
the Killing Wood, and held her closely to me; that was a great event
between us; but we were shy of one another, shy even of very intimate
words; and a thousand daring and beautiful things I dreamt of saying to
her went unsaid. I do not remember any endearing names from that time.
But we jested and shared our humors, shaped our developing ideas in
quaint forms to amuse one another and