I turned over for the signature, and found my own mother's. Was it not a
strange sweet meeting? And only then did the memory of her handwriting
from far back come to me. She died, dear Highness, before I was seven
years old. I love her as I do my early memory of flowers, as something
very sweet, hardly as a real person.
I noticed she loved best in men and women what they lack most often: in a
man, a fair mind; in a woman, courage. "Brave women and fair men," she
wrote. Byron might have turned in his grave at having his dissolute
stiff-neck so wrung for him by misquotation. And she--it must have been
before the eighties had started the popular craze for him--chose Meredith,
my own dear Meredith, for her favorite author. How our tastes would have
run together had she lived!
Well, I know you fair, and believe myself brave--constitutionally, so
that I can't help it: and this, therefore, is not self-praise. But
fairness in a man is a deadly hard acquirement, I begin now to discover.
You have it fixed fast in you.
You, I think, began to do just things consciously, as the burden of
manhood began in you. I love to think of you growing by degrees till you
could carry your head so--and no other way; so that, looking at you, I
can promise myself you never did a mean thing, and never consciously an
unjust thing except to yourself. I can just fancy that fault in you.
But, whatever--I love you for it more and more, and am proud knowing you
and finding that we are to become friends. For it is that, and no less
than that, now.
I love you; and me you like cordially: and that is enough. I need not
look behind it, for already I have no way to repay you for the happiness
this brings me.
I.
Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear; and it takes long thinking. Not
merely such a quantity of thought, but such a quality, makes so hard a
day's work that by the end of it I am quite drowsy. Bless me, dearest; all
to-day has belonged to you; and to-morrow, I know, waits to become yours
without the asking: just as without the asking I too am yours. I wish it
were more possible for us to give service to those we love. I am most glad
because I see you so often: but I come and go in your life empty-handed,
though I have so much to give away. Thoughts, the best I have, I give you:
I cannot empty my brain of them. Some day you shall think well of me.--That
is a vow, dear friend,--you whom I love so much!