"My bridesmaid's kit is Grizel's present, and seems stretching to immense proportions. A dress for the ceremony, and a dress for the evening, and a hat and a cloak, and fal-lals of every description. Do you think the regiment will give some function to let me show them off? Now that my own future no longer casts its shadow over the whole landscape, I am immensely enjoying the engaged couple. They are so deliriously gay and young, and happy and hopeful; and the nice part about it is--it is going to last! I feel _sure_ it will, for through his long experience of sorrow and loss Martin has learned how to give the one all-important thing that is necessary to a woman's happiness. Have you the slightest idea what it is? You will smile at the sentiment of women, and say `Love, of course,' but it isn't love, at least it is not necessarily included in that term. Many a man honestly loves his wife, and yet succeeds in making her miserable. No! it is just a simple, homely quality without which the grandest of passions is incomplete! _Tenderness_! Tenderness means kindness and understanding, and sympathy, and imagination, and patience--above all, _patience_! When a man is in love he thinks a woman perfect, but she isn't, she is an irrational, inconsequent creature, whose mate will have need of patience every day of his life, and sometimes many times a day. Of course there _do_ exist female paragons, calm, correct creatures, with smooth hair and chiselled features, who are always serene and self-contained, but then they are also independent of tenderness. This grows complicated! I'd better drop pretence and confess at once that when I talk generalities I really mean You and Me, the two people who are at the back of _all_ generalities! "I am erratic and variable... On Tuesday, for no tangible cause, I feel bubbling over with happiness; on Wednesday, for an equally logical reason, I crave for death. On occasions I can be exasperatingly contrary. I know it all the time, and am furious with myself, but that only makes me worse! On after reflection I either pray and fast, or in brazen fashion excuse myself on the score of electric influences! After all, why shouldn't I? We are the most sensitive of machines, and if climatic disturbances affect the wires at a distance of thousands of miles, why should _We_ pass unscathed? I sometimes think we are too hard on our own moods and tempers, but they are trying enough in any case for the other person. The question of the hour is this--Could _You_ be tender to _Me_??? "Only four weeks and I'm off! It will be more convenient for me to leave directly after the wedding, and if 'twere done, 'twere well done quickly. Grizel's _trousseau_ is reaching the acute stage, and I thought I was busy enough helping her, without starting a second on my-- "What _am_ I saying! I must be mad. You understand that I trust to that three months' truce, and that I promise nothing--nothing. I only _hope_!