“What would have been the end, had you really found me? Certainly a sincere, satisfying friendship. No mysterious magnetic force has drawn you to me or held you near me, nor has my experiment inspired me with an interest which cannot be given up without a personal pang. I am grieved, for the sake of all men and all women. Yet, understand me! I mean no slightest reproach. I esteem and honor you for what you are. Farewell!” There! Nothing could be kinder in tone, nothing more humiliating in substance. I was sore and offended for a few days; but I soon began to see, and ever more and more clearly, that she was wholly right. I was sure, also, that any further attempt to correspond with her would be vain. It all comes of taking society just as we find it, and supposing that conventional courtesy is the only safe ground on which men and women can meet. The fact is--there’s no use in hiding it from myself (and I see, by your face, that the letter cuts into your own conscience)--she is a free, courageous, independent character, and--I am not. But who _was_ she? HENRY CUYLER BUNNER 1855–1896 From early manhood until his death H. C. Bunner was the editor of “Puck.” Those who appreciated the flavor of _Airs from Arcady_ and _Rowen_, and who knew of “Puck” only that it was our most popular comic weekly, felt here an incongruity. If they had followed the editorial page, they would have found dignity no less than pungency, and might have comprehended the man as more than a maker of delicate verses and more than a humorist. In the ordinary sense he was hardly a humorist. Humor was large in him, but all suffused with fancy. Loving New York as Charles Lamb loved London, he was even more like Lamb in that his quip habitually carried a sentiment springing from human sympathy. This ultimate quality reconciled the others of a singularly original composition. His fiction shows all these traits, and also a nice sense of form. He was a student of Boccaccio; he experimented with various adaptations, as in _The Third Figure of the Cotillion_ with the method of Irving; and, though his preference was for freer and more spontaneous structure, he was keenly aware, as in the story below, of the value of the unities. THE LOVE-LETTERS OF SMITH [_From “Short Sixes,” copyright, 1890, by Keppler and Schwarzmann; reprinted here by their special permission_]