Thus my wife and I have begun life together.  I think that most of our evenings will be spent in the room dedicated to a kind word for life universal.  No matter how closely the warring forces of existence, within or without, have pressed upon us elsewhere, when we enter there we enter peace.  We shall be walled in, from all darkness of whatsoever meaning; our better selves will be the sole guests of those luminous hours.  And surely no greater good-fortune can befall any household than to escape an ignoble evening.  To attain a noble one is like lying calmly down to sleep on a mountain-top towards which our feet have struggled upward amid enemies all day long.

Although we have now been two months married, I have not yet captured the old uncapturable loveliness of nature which has always led me and still leads me on in the person of Georgiana, I know but too well now that I never shall.  The charm in her which I pursue, yet never overtake, is part and parcel of that ungraspable beauty of the world which forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit—­of that elusive, infinite splendor of God which flows from afar into all terrestrial things, filling them as color fills the rose.  Even while I live with Georgiana in the closest of human relationships, she retains for me the uncomprehended brightness and freshness of a dream that does not end and has no waking.

This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of my desire to enfold her entire self into mine.  We have been a revelation to each other, but the revelation is not complete; there are curtains behind curtains, which one by one we seek to lift as we penetrate more deeply into the discoveries of our union.  Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting beside me, put her arm around my neck and look long into my eyes, full of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at what it means for a man and a woman to live together as we live.  Yet, folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfilment.  Often she appears to be vainly hovering on the outside of a too solid sphere, seeking an entrance to where I really am.  Even during the intimate silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing walls of flesh—­we but cling together across the lone, impassable gulfs of individual being.

During these October nights the moon has reached its fulness and the earth been flooded with beauty.

Our bed is placed near a window; and as the planet sinks across the sky its rays stream through the open shutter and fall upon Georgiana in her sleep.  Sometimes I lie awake for the sole chance of seeing them float upon her hair, pass lingeringly across her face, and steal holily downward along her figure.  How august she is in her purity!  The whiteness of the fairest cloud that brushes the silvering orb is as pitch to the whiteness of her nature.

The other night as I lay watching her thus, and while the lower part of the bed remained in deep shadow, I could see that the thin covering had slipped aside, leaving Georgiana’s feet exposed.