you have been for three weeks; and nobody here will be able to forget you; and yet I think you may forget us.  One can’t care without suffering, and I think that you don’t suffer.  It is all a pleasure and delight to you.  You win hearts, and don’t give your own.  Don’t think I am ungrateful.  You have made a great difference already to my life; but you have made me suffer too.  I know that like Telemachus in Tennyson’s poem you will be ’decent not to fail in offices of tenderness’—­I know I can depend on you to do everything that is kind and considerate and just.  You won’t disappoint me.  You will do out of a natural kindliness and courtesy what many people can only do by loving.  You don’t claim things, you don’t lay hands on things; and it looks so like unselfishness that it seems detestable of me to say anything.  But you will have to give yourself away, and I don’t think you have ever done that.  I can say all this, my dear, because I love you, as a mother might; you are my son indeed; but there is something in you that will have to be broken; we have all of us to be broken.  It isn’t that you have anything to repent of.  You would take endless trouble to help anyone who wanted help, you would be endlessly patient and tender and strong; but you do not really know what love means, because it does not hurt or wound you.  You are like Achilles, was it not, who had been dipped in the river of death, and you are invulnerable.  You won’t, I know, resent my saying this?  I know you won’t—­and the fact that you will not makes it harder for me to say it—­but I almost wish it would wound you, instead of making you think how you can amend it.  You can’t amend it, but God and love can; only you must dare to let yourself go.  You must not be wise and forbearing.  There, dear, I won’t say more!”

Howard took her hand and kissed it.  “Thank you,” he said, “thank you a hundred times for speaking so.  It is perfectly true, every word of it.  It is curious that to-day I have seen myself three times mirrored in other minds.  I don’t like what I see—­I am not complacent—­I am not flattered.  But I don’t know what to do!  I feel like a patient with a hopeless disease, who has been listening to a perfectly kind and wise physician.  But what can I do?  It is just the vital impulse which is lacking.  I will be frank too; it is quite true that I live in the surface of things.  I am so much interested in books, ideas, thoughts, I am fascinated by the study of human temperament; people delight me, excite me, amuse me; but nothing ever comes inside.  I don’t excuse myself, but I say:  ’It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.’  I am just so, as you have described, and I feel what a hollow-hearted sort of person I am.  Yet I go on amusing myself with friendships and interests.  I have never suffered, and I have never loved.  Well, I would like to change all that, but can I?”