The next season was a brilliant one, made so by the strength of my wanting him, and by the sense of completeness and finality which came to me out of the faith that we had been ordained to be lovers from the beginning. It began to seem, in the fashion in which we had been brought together as boy and girl and then mated in ways which, creditable as they had been, yet offered no obstacle to the freshness and vitality of our passion, that we had been guided by that intelligence which in any emergency of my gift, I felt rush to save it. That I had been prevented from any absorbing interest until it had grown and flowered in me, appeared now to have come about by direct manipulation of the Powers. I had curious and interesting adventures that winter in the farthest unexplored territory of the artistic consciousness, which tempt me at every turn to put by my story for the purpose of making them plain to you, and I am only deterred from it by the certainty that you couldn't get it plain in any case. A few days ago I picked up a copy of Dante and found myself convicted of shallowness in never having taken his passion for the cold-blooded Beatrice seriously, by finding the evidence of its absolute quality in the circle within circle of his hells and paradisos, the rhythm of aches and exaltations. And if you couldn't get that from Dante, how much less from anything I might have to say to you. After all these years I do not know what is the relation of Art to Passion, but I have experienced it. If I said anything it would be by way of persuading you that loving is not an end in itself, but the pull upward to our native heaven, which is no hymn-book heaven, but a world of the Spirit wherein things are made and remade and called good. What I made out of it at that time was the material of a satisfying success, and though I got on without him much better than I could have expected, the fact that after all, he did not get any nearer to me than the Pacific coast, had its effect in the year's adventures.