And now good-night, and no more, no more at all! I send out an "I love
you" to be my celestial commercial traveler for me while I fold myself
up and become its sleeping partner.
Good-night: you are the best and truest that I ever dreamed yet.
H.
Dear Highness: I begin not to be able to name you anything, for there is
not a word for you that will do! "Highness" you are: but that leaves gaps
and coldnesses without end. "Royal," yet much more serene than royal:
though by that I don't mean any detraction from your royalty, for I never
saw a man carry his invisible crown with so level a head and no
haughtiness at all: and that is the finest royalty of look possible.
I look at you and wonder so how you have grown to this--to have become
king so quietly without any coronation ceremony. You have thought more
than you should for happiness at your age; making me, by that one line
in your forehead, think you were three years older than you really are.
I wish--if I dare wish you anything different--that you were! It makes
me uncomfortable to remember that I am--what? Almost half a year your
elder as time flies:--not really, for your brain was born long before
mine began to rattle in its shell. You say quite old things, and
quietly, as if you had had them in your mind ten years already. When you
told me about your two old pensioners, the blind man and his wife, whom
you brought to so funny a reconciliation, I felt ("mir war, ich wuszte
nicht wie") that I would like very much to go blindfold led by you: it
struck me suddenly how happy would be a blindfoldness of perfect trust
such as one might have with your hands on one. I suppose that is what in
religion is called faith: I haven't it there, my dear; but I have it in
you now. I love you, beginning to understand why: at first I did not. I
am ashamed not to have discovered it earlier. The matter with you is
that you have goodness prevailing in you, an integrity of goodness, I
mean:--a different thing from there being a whereabouts for goodness in
you; that we all have in some proportion or another. I was quite right
to love you: I know it now,--I did not when I first did.
Yesterday I was turning over a silly "confession book" in which a rose was
everybody's favorite flower, manliness the finest quality for a man, and
womanliness for a woman (which is as much as to say that pig is the best
quality for pork, and pork for pig): till I came upon one different from
the others, and found myself saying "Yes" all down the page.