Oh, Beloved, could you see into my heart now, or I into yours, time would grow to nothing for us; and my childhood would stay unwritten!

From far and near I gather my thoughts of you for the kiss I cannot give.  Good-night, dearest.

LETTER LXIX.

Beloved:  I remember my second birthday.  I am quite sure of it, because my third I remember so infinitely well.—­Then I was taken in to see Arthur lying in baby bridal array of lace fringes and gauze, and received in my arms held up for me by Nan-nan the awful weight and imperial importance of his small body.

I think from the first I was told of him as my “brother”:  cousin I have never been able to think him.  But all this belongs to my third:  on my second, I remember being on a floor of roses; and they told me if I would go across to a clipboard and pull it open there would be something there waiting for me.  And it was on all-fours that I went all eagerness across great patches of rose-pattern, till I had butted my way through a door left ajar, and found in a cardboard box of bright tinsel and flowers two little wax babes in the wood lying.

I think they gave me my first sense of color, except, perhaps, the rose-carpet which came earlier, and they remained for quite a long time the most beautiful thing I knew.  It is strange that I cannot remember what became of them, for I am sure I neither broke nor lost them,—­perhaps it was done for me:  Arthur came afterward, the tomb of many of my early joys, and the maker of so many new ones.  He, dearest, is the one, the only one, who has seen the tears that belong truly to you:  and he blesses me with such wonderful patience when I speak your name, allowing that perhaps I know better than he.  And after the wax babies I had him for my third birthday.

LETTER LXX.

Beloved:  I think that small children see very much as animals must do:  just the parts of things which have a direct influence on their lives, and no memory outside that.  I remember the kindness or frowns of faces in early days far more than the faces themselves:  and it is quite a distinct and later memory that I have of standing within a doorway and watching my mother pass downstairs unconscious of my being there,—­and then, for the first time, studying her features and seeing in them a certain solitude and distance which I had never before noticed:—­I suppose because I had never before thought of looking at her when she was not concerned with me.

It was this unobservance of actual features, I imagine, which made me think all gray-haired people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing those who called, except generically as callers—­people who kissed me, and whom therefore I liked to see.

One, I remember, for no reason unless because she had a brown face, I mistook from a distance for my Aunt Dolly, and bounded into the room where she was sitting, with a cry of rapture.  And it was my earliest conscious test of politeness, when I found out my mistake, not to cry over it in the kind but very inferior presence to that one I had hoped for.