My dear Mr. Gilbert:—­Your letter followed me across the ocean, and chanced to be the first one opened and read in my weighty home mail to-day.  I have lost all trace of you during the last six years, in that wonderful way people can lose sight of one another in a large city.  Once or twice I heard you had just left some social function as I arrived, or was expected just as I was leaving, and once, recently, I saw you across the house at a first night, with a very pretty girl at your side.  I fancy this is the “one woman in the world for you,” of whom you speak in the letter before me—­the letter written the evening before your marriage.  How good you are to carry out my request made seven years ago, and to write me this beautiful letter, after reading over and burning your former boyish epistle, returning to me my reply.

It is every man’s duty to himself, his bride, and the other woman, to destroy all evidences of past infatuations and affections, before he enters the new life.  It is every woman’s duty to do the same—­with a reservation.  Since men demand so much more of a wife than a wife demands of a husband, a woman is wise to retain any proof in her possession that some man has been an honourable suitor for her hand.  She should make no use of such evidence, unless the unaccepted lover indulges in disrespectful comments or revengeful libels, as some men are inclined to when the fruit for which they reached is picked by another hand.

And it is when the grapes are called sour that the evidence may prove effective of their having been thought sweet and desirable.

It is a curious fact that no woman thinks less of a man for his having had his vain infatuations, and that all men think less of a woman if she has loved without response.

Therefore, it behoves her to destroy no evidence that the other man, not herself, was the discarded party.

But woe unto the man who retains old love-letters, or other tokens of dead loves and perished desires.

Few men could be guilty of showing or repeating the contents of another man’s love-letters.  Women who are models of virtue and goodness have been known to make public the letters written a man in earlier years by another object of his affections.  I have to my personal knowledge known a woman to place before the eyes of a third person, lines written evidently in the very heart’s blood of a former sweetheart of her husband—­words the man believed he had destroyed with other letters, more than a score of years before.  Imagine what the feelings of that early sweetheart, now a happy and beloved wife, would be, did she know the words written so long ago were spread before cold and critical eyes, and discussed by two people who could have no comprehension of the conditions and circumstances which led to their expression.

Because I know otherwise tender-hearted and good women are capable of such acts, I am glad you have obeyed my wish of seven years ago, and that all proofs of your boyish infatuation for an older woman are destroyed.  You say you have told the girl you love that you once were foolishly fond of me, and that I helped you to higher ideals of womanhood and life.