with the serious look and muddled ideas, far the better of the two.  I don’t know why.  Tommy Ashe attracted me physically.  I recognized that ultimately—­and that alone isn’t enough, although it is probably the basis of many matings.  So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more protective passion.  I’d like to mother you, to tease you—­and mend your socks!  Oh, my dear, I can’t marry you, and I wish I could.  I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours, and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash, until we should hate each other.

And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for awhile as if I’d lost something.  I have felt that way these weeks that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me.  I have felt it more keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don’t know where you may have gone, nor if you will ever come back.  I find myself wondering how you will fare in this grim country.  You’re such a visionary.  You’re so impractical.  And neither nature nor society is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable.

Do you understand what I’ve been trying to tell you?  I wonder if you will?  Or if I am too incoherent.  I feel that perhaps I am.  I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them.  I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.  I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey.  I am making an experiment that fascinates me.  Yet I have regrets.  I am uncertain.  I am doing the thing which my nature and my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity.  I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow very strong if I let myself go.

I can see you scowl.  You will say to yourself—­looking at it from your own peculiar angle—­you will say:  “She is not worth thinking about.”  And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you say it.  Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you, just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought and act that I could not endure, still—­knowing all this—­I feel a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you—­and that is often.

I shall change, of course.  So will you.  Psychologically, love doesn’t endure to death—­unless it is nurtured by association, unless it has its foundation in community of interest and effort, a mutual affection that can survive hard knocks.

Good-by, dear freckled man.  You have taught me something.  I hope I have done as much for you.  I’m sorry it couldn’t be different.  But—­a man must be able to stand on his own feet, eh?  I leave you to puzzle out what “standing on his own feet” means.  Good-by.

    Sophie.