So with the sun still a long way out of bed, I have to tuck up these sheets for you, as if the good of the day had already been sufficient unto itself and its full tale had been told.  Good-night.  It is so hard to take my hands off writing to you, and worry on at the same exercise in another direction.  I kiss you more times than I can count:  it is almost really you that I kiss now!  My very dearest, my own sweetheart, whom I so worship.  Good-night!  “Good-afternoon” sounds too funny:  is outside our vocabulary altogether.  While I live, I must love you more than I know!

LETTER VII.

My Friend:  Do you think this a cold way of beginning?  I do not:  is it not the true send-off of love?  I do not know how men fall in love:  but I could not have had that come-down in your direction without being your friend first.  Oh, my dear, and after, after; it is but a limitless friendship I have grown into!

I have heard men run down the friendships of women as having little true substance.  Those who speak so, I think, have never come across a real case of woman’s friendship.  I praise my own sex, dearest, for I know some of their loneliness, which you do not:  and until a certain date their friendship was the deepest thing in life I had met with.

For must it not be true that a woman becomes more absorbed in friendship than a man, since friendship may have to mean so much more to her, and cover so far more of her life, than it does to the average man?  However big a man’s capacity for friendship, the beauty of it does not fill his whole horizon for the future:  he still looks ahead of it for the mate who will complete his life, giving his body and soul the complement they require.  Friendship alone does not satisfy him:  he makes a bigger claim on life, regarding certain possessions as his right.

But a woman:—­oh, it is a fashion to say the best women are sure to find husbands, and have, if they care for it, the certainty before them of a full life.  I know it is not so.  There are women, wonderful ones, who come to know quite early in life that no men will ever wish to make wives of them:  for them, then, love in friendship is all that remains, and the strongest wish of all that can pass through their souls with hope for its fulfillment is to be a friend to somebody.

It is man’s arrogant certainty of his future which makes him impatient of the word “friendship”:  it cools life to his lips, he so confident that the headier nectar is his due!

I came upon a little phrase the other day that touched me so deeply:  it said so well what I have wanted to say since we have known each other.  Some peasant rhymer, an Irishman, is singing his love’s praises, and sinks his voice from the height of his passionate superlatives to call her his “share of the world.”  Peasant and Irishman, he knew that his fortune did not embrace the universe:  but for him his love was just that—­his share of the world.