Why just at New Year's time, you ask? Another season has begun, new relations are entered into, new intrigues are woven, inclinations newly awakened crop up shyly to the surface. Christmas belonged to the old era still; the happiness comfortably enjoying itself in dressing-gown and slippers still held sway over the discomforts of the new passion knocking turbulently at the door. But now, at New Year, there's a general clearing out, and all worn love-goods are disposed of "previous to removal," as the advertisements read. The heart's change of residence is probably the saddest there is. Many things get broken and many a cherished memento falls into the gutter. But if it cannot be prevented, then the moving may as well be done thoroughly and energetically. "Off with the old love before you're on with the new." A truth of startling pregnancy. Many a person has arrived too late because he lingered too long saying good-bye. Piles of novels could be written on this subject. Sometimes, too, the heart stays in the old house but moves to another apartment. Then hate follows love and love follows hate, the latter, at least, in Marlitt's romances. And more than this, friendship moves in where love once dwelt. And then, finally, there are the cases in which friendship clears the way for love. You shake your head. You believe friendship never clears the way for love? You mean because we two friends are so proof against love? Oh, we are the exception. Between us rises the intellectual love of truth like a crystal wall in the Arctic Ocean. But I can give you examples, my dear lady, any number of examples, of friendship clearing the way for love. And mostly unhappy examples. It seems to be an iron law of happiness that love should begin with passion and end in the peace of tranquil friendship--marriage, I mean. The reverse way is not excluded, but it leads--to the desert. There are abstract enthusiasts that construe the marriage of souls as a necessary preliminary to physical love. But nature punishes lying. When friendship between a man and a woman ends in love, either the friendship or the love is not true. And woe, woe if the friendship has not been friendship but love. Apropos of this--do you happen to remember the portrait of a woman that created such a stir at the exhibition two or three years ago and brought the painter so much fame and so many orders? A frail figure, almost too frail, in a simple black velvet dress. A thin suffering face, a pale forehead with the crown on it of the quiet aristocracy of thought. Half-closed dreamy eyes, a bluish gleam from between dark lashes. Upper lip covered with fine down and an expression of longing and smiling melancholy about the mouth. Now I remember to a dot. You and I admired the picture together. You stood studying it a long time and then said: "That's the way I fancy Vittoria Colonna must have looked."