Formerly I was a person, now I am a chattel.  Not a few tears have I gulped down, alone and far from every one.  How gladly would I have exchanged them for a consoling smile!  Why are our destinies so unequal?  Your soul expands in the atmosphere of a lawful passion.  For you, virtue will coincide with pleasure.  If you encounter pain, it will be of your own free choice.  Your duty, if you marry Felipe, will be one with the sweetest, freest indulgence of feeling.  Our future is big with the answer to my question, and I look for it with restless eagerness.

You love and are adored.  Oh! my dear, let this noble romance, the old subject of our dreams, take full possession of your soul.  Womanly beauty, refined and spiritualized in you, was created by God, for His own purposes, to charm and to delight.  Yes, my sweet, guard well the secret of your heart, and submit Felipe to those ingenious devices of ours for testing a lover’s metal.  Above all, make trial of your own love, for this is even more important.  It is so easy to be misled by the deceptive glamour of novelty and passion, and by the vision of happiness.

Alone of the two friends, you remain in your maiden independence; and I beseech you, dearest, do not risk the irrevocable step of marriage without some guarantee.  It happens sometimes, when two are talking together, apart from the world, their souls stripped of social disguise, that a gesture, a word, a look lights up, as by a flash, some dark abyss.  You have courage and strength to tread boldly in paths where others would be lost.

You have no conception in what anxiety I watch you.  Across all this space I see you; my heart beats with yours.  Be sure, therefore, to write and tell me everything.  Your letters create an inner life of passion within my homely, peaceful household, which reminds me of a level highroad on a gray day.  The only event here, my sweet, is that I am playing cross-purposes with myself.  But I don’t want to tell you about it just now; it must wait for another day.  With dogged obstinacy, I pass from despair to hope, now yielding, now holding back.  It may be that I ask from life more than we have a right to claim.  In youth we are so ready to believe that the ideal and the real will harmonize!

I have been pondering alone, seated beneath a rock in my park, and the fruit of my pondering is that love in marriage is a happy accident on which it is impossible to base a universal law.  My Aveyron philosopher is right in looking on the family as the only possible unit in society, and in placing woman in subjection to the family, as she has been in all ages.  The solution of this great—­for us almost awful —­question lies in our first child.  For this reason, I would gladly be a mother, were it only to supply food for the consuming energy of my soul.