I ask myself uneasily, can be the matter with this apparently healthy, well-cared-for young man? And then, forced to the conclusion by unmistakable symptoms that there is nothing the matter except a surfeit of good things, I have perhaps pounced upon you with something of the zeal of an aunt moved to anger, and given you a spiritual slapping. You sighed for a sister--you are always sighing for something--and asked me to be one; well, I have apparently gone beyond the sister in decision and authority, and developed something of the acerbity of an aunt. So you are down at Clinches. How beautiful it must be there this month. I think of it as a harmony in gray and amethyst, remembering your description of it the first time you went there; a harmony in a minor key, that captured you wholly by its tender subtleties. When I think of you inheriting such a place later on through your wife I do from my heart feel that your engagement is an excellent thing. She must indeed be happy in the knowledge that she can give you so much that is absolutely worth having. It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the very most beautiful things in life. I quarrel with my poverty only because I can give so little, so seldom, and then never more than ridiculous small trumperies. To make up for them I try to give as much of myself as possible, gifts of sympathy, helpfulness, kindness. Don't laugh, but I am practicing on my step-mother. It is easy to pour out love on Papa; so easy, so effortless, that I do not feel as if it could be worth much; but I have made up my mind, not without something of a grim determination that seems to have little enough to do with love, to give my step-mother as much of me, my affections, my services, as she can do with. Perhaps she won't be able to do with much. Anyhow all she wants she shall have. You know I have often wished I had been a man, able to pull on my boots and go out into the wide world without let or hindrance; but for one thing I am glad to be a woman, and that one thing is that the woman gives. It is so far less wonderful to take. The man is always taking, the woman always giving; and giving so wonderfully, in the face sometimes of dreadful disaster, of shipwreck, of death--which explains perhaps her longer persistence in clinging to the skirts of a worn-out passion; for is not the tenderer feeling on the side of the one who gave and blessed? Always, always on that side? Mixing into what was sensual some of the dear divineness of the mother-love? I think I could never grow wholly indifferent to a person to whom I had given much. He or she would not, could not, be the same to me as other people. Time would pass, and the growing number of the days blunt the first sharp edge of feeling; but the memory of what I had given would bind us together in a friendship for ever unlike any other.