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.

Surely when in anyone's friendship we seem to have gained our share of
the world, that is all that can be said. It means all that we can take
in, the whole armful the heart and senses are capable of, or that fate
can bestow. And for how many that must be friendship--especially for how
many women!

My dear, you are my share of the world, also my share of Heaven: but
there I begin to speak of what I do not know, as is the way with happy
humanity. All that my eyes could dream of waking or sleeping, all that
my ears could be most glad to hear, all that my heart could beat faster
to get hold of--your friendship gave me suddenly as a bolt from the
blue.

My friend, my friend, my friend! If you could change or go out of my
life now, the sun would drop out of my heavens: I should see the world
with a great piece gashed out of its side,--my share of it gone. No, I
should not see it, I don't think I should see anything ever again,--not
truly.

Is it not strange how often to test our happiness we harp on sorrow? I
do: don't let it weary you. I know I have read somewhere that great love
always entails pain. I have not found it yet: but, for me, it does mean
fear,--the sort of fear I had as a child going into big buildings. I
loved them: but I feared, because of their bigness, they were likely to
tumble on me.

But when I begin to think you may be too big for me, I remember you as
my "friend," and the fear goes for a time, or becomes that sort of fear
I would not part with if I might.

I have no news for you: only the old things to tell you, the wonder of
which ever remains new. How holy your face has become to me: as I saw it
last, with something more than the usual proofs of love for me upon
it--a look as if your love troubled you! I know the trouble: I feel it,
dearest, in my own woman's way. Have patience.--When I see you so, I
feel that prayer is the only way given me for saying what my love for
you wishes to be. And yet I hardly ever pray in words.

Dearest, be happy when you get this: and, when you can, come and give my
happiness its rest. Till then it is a watchman on the lookout.

"Night-night!" Your true sleepy one.

Beloved: I have been trusting to fate, while keeping silence, that
something from you was to come to-day and make me specially happy. And it
has: bless you abundantly! You have undone and got round all I said about
"jewelry," though this is nothing of the sort, but a shrine: so my word
remains. I have it with me now, safe hidden, only now and then it comes
out to have a look at me,--smiles and goes back again. Dearest, you must
_feel_ how I thank you, for I cannot say it: body and soul I grow too much
blessed with all that you have given me, both visibly and invisibly, and
always perfectly.

And as for the day: I have been thinking you the most uncurious of men,
because you had not asked: and supposed it was too early days yet for
you to remember that I had ever been born. To-day is my birthday! you
said nothing, so I said nothing; and yet this has come: I trusted my
star to show its sweet influences in its own way. Or, after all, did you
know, and had you asked anyone but me? Yet had you known, you would
have wished me the "happy returns" which among all your dear words to me
you do not. So I take it that the motion comes straight to you from
heaven; and, in the event, you will pardon me for having been still
secretive and shy in not telling what you did not inquire after.
_Yours_, I knew, dear, quite long ago, so had no need to ask you for it.
And it is six months before you will be in the same year with me again,
and give to twenty-two all the companionable sweetness that twenty-one
has been having.

Many happy returns of _my_ birthday to you, dearest! That is all that my
birthdays are for. Have you been happy to-day, I wonder? and am
wondering also whether this evening we shall see you walking quietly in
and making everything into perfection that has been trembling just on
the verge of it all day long.

One drawback of my feast is that I have to write short to you; for there
are other correspondents who on this occasion look for quick answers,
and not all of them to be answered in an offhand way. Except you, it is
the coziest whom I keep waiting; but elders have a way with them--even
kind ones: and when they condescend to write upon an anniversary, we
have to skip to attention or be in their bad books at once.

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!

Dearest and rightly Beloved: You cannot tell how your gift has pleased me;
or rather you _can_, for it shows you have a long memory back to our first
meeting: though at the time I was the one who thought most of it.

It is quite true; you have the most beautifully shaped memory in
Christendom: these are the very books in the very edition I have long
wanted, and have been too humble to afford myself. And now I cannot stop
to read one, for joy of looking at them all in a row. I will kiss you
for them all, and for more besides: indeed it is the "besides" which
brings you my kisses at all.

Now that you have chosen so perfectly to my mind, I may proffer a
request which, before, I was shy of making. It seems now beneficently
anticipated. It is that you will not ever let your gifts take the form
of jewelry, not after the ring which you are bringing me: _that_, you
know, I both welcome and wish for. But, as to the rest, the world has
supplied me with a feeling against jewelry as a love-symbol. Look
abroad and you will see: it is too possessive, too much like "chains of
office"--the fair one is to wear her radiant harness before the world,
that other women may be envious and the desire of her master's eye be
satisfied! Ah, no!

I am yours, dear, utterly; and nothing you give me would have that sense:
I know you too well to think it. But in the face of the present fashion
(and to flout it), which expects the lover to give in this sort, and the
beloved to show herself a dazzling captive, let me cherish my ritual of
opposition which would have no meaning if we were in a world of our own,
and no place in my thoughts, dearest;--as it has not now, so far as you
are concerned. But I am conscious I shall be looked at as your chosen; and
I would choose my own way of how to look back most proudly.

And so for the books more thanks and more,--that they are what I would
most wish, and not anything else: which, had they been, they would still
have given me pleasure, since from you they could come only with a good
meaning: and--diamonds even--I could have put up with them!

To-morrow you come for your ring, and bring me my own? Yours is here
waiting. I have it on my finger, very loose, with another standing
sentry over it to keep it from running away.

A mouse came out of my wainscot last night, and plunged me in horrible
dilemma: for I am equally idiotic over the idea of the creature trapped
or free, and I saw sleepless nights ahead of me till I had secured a
change of locality for him.

To startle him back into hiding would have only deferred my getting
truly rid of him, so I was most tiptoe and diplomatic in my doings.
Finally, a paper bag, put into a likely nook with some sentimentally
preserved wedding-cake crumbled into it, crackled to me of his arrival.
In a brave moment I noosed the little beast, bag and all, and lowered
him from the window by string, till the shrubs took from me the burden
of responsibility.

I visited the bag this morning: he had eaten his way out, crumbs and
all: and has, I suppose, become a fieldmouse, for the hay smells
invitingly, and it is only a short run over the lawn and a jump over the
ha-ha to be in it. Poor morsels, I prefer them so much undomesticated!

Now this mouse is no allegory, and the paper bag is _not_ a diamond
necklace, in spite of the wedding-cake sprinkled over it! So don't say
that this letter is too hard for your understanding, or you will
frighten me from telling you anything foolish again. Brains are like
jewels in this, difference of surface has nothing to do with the size
and value of them. Yours is a beautiful smooth round, like a pearl, and
mine all facets and flashes like cut glass. And yours so much the
bigger, and I love it so much the best! The trap which caught me was
baited with one great pearl. So the mouse comes in with a meaning tied
to its tail after all!