“YOU will wonder at seeing this letter from me,” Glenn wrote to Esther, “for it will not be a usual one--not at all the sort of letter you have been accustomed to receiving from me. Perhaps it is that I have changed--greatly changed from that old self you knew--most of all changed from what I used to be to you. I can see you now as you looked to me that afternoon at Indian Well, when I first spoke to you. You touched me so closely then--so nearly--and you were such a child. “All through that first year I think you could never have guessed how much the blossoming of that little wild heart of yours meant to me. I watched it from day to day, from month to month, so closely. Maybe I watered it some, and pulled some of the weeds that might have crowded its roots. I hope so. You were a child then and I a man, yet I had been a man without a passion. I thought much in those days, and dreamed that I knew myself. Achievement was my god. I told myself that my interest in you was the interest of the philosopher--the master--and I watched your mind unfold with a curious delight. I know now, dear, that it was a far different feeling from that--one that went far deeper and meant much more to me, even when I would not admit it to myself. It is to his own heart last of all that a man admits his own error. And yet, as I look back at it now, I think that I meant to be honest with myself. When you came to the city and I saw the wondrous woman that had grown--when I saw your flower heart--still the heart of the child in all that was sweet and innocent--turning more and more towards me for its sun--it waked something new within me. I saw the problem. I felt your dependence grow each day stronger. You leaned upon me so that I thought sometimes I could feel every throb of your heart. You were achieving. Your art was growing. Your genius was lifting. You were coming nearer and nearer to the ideal that I had imagined for you. When such a development has become the great and absorbing passion of a man’s life, I cannot express to you how haunting becomes the fear of disappointment, how terrible the jealousy of circumstance that may step between him and its fulfillment. You had beautiful ideals--such as I have had--and they had grown a part of you. To lose them would have ashed the ember; it would have deadened the quick sensibilities and wounded that soul-instinct of yours in which your music lived. And when I saw these ideals dependent upon me--upon my presence--upon the sympathy of mine, which I could not have denied if I had tried--I stood by them and you. Dear, the soul of a woman is a wonderful thing. It will not bear experiment. Yours was like a sensitive plant that cannot bear the light, and sheds its loveliest perfume in the dark. So I tried to give it the darkness--to cloud the glare of hollowness that was in our world--to let the light in slowly and only when the leaves were strong enough to bear it. All this time I could not help but see that when I