"The door opens, and I am satisfied. In the space of a second's gaze I meet what my soul has been waiting for, ah, how long! I think always. Have I lived before in some other life that no surprise touches me?--that it is just as if I am only meeting the embodiment of a disintegrated floating image that has often flashed before my consciousness, and flown before I could fix it? Has this man, or some psychical part of this man, been in touch with me before, or how is it? I stand still and stretch out my hand; I check an impulse to put out both, I feel so tremulously happy. I know before he speaks how his voice will sound, what his touch will be like before he clasps my hand. It is odd how the most important crisis of our lives often comes upon us in the most commonplace way. It is the fashion to decry love; yet the vehemence of the denials, the keenness of the weapons of satire and scepticism that are turned against it only prove its existence. As long as man is man and woman is woman, it will be to them at some time the sweetest and possibly the most fatal interest in life to them. Thrust it aside for ambition or gain, slight it as you will, sooner or later it will have its revenge. I had felt no breath of it as maid, wife, or widow; my heart had been a free, wild, shy thing, jessed by my will. Sometimes, by way of experiment, I let it fly to some one for an hour, but always to call it back again to my own safe keeping. Now it left me. "We sat and talked,--rather I talked, I think, and he listened. He said my going to see him even on literary grounds was eccentric; but then it seemed I had a way of doing as I pleased without exciting much comment. How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it! Was I really going away? How tiresome it was, really awfully tiresome! What was he like? Well, an American bison or a lion. You might put his head among the rarest and handsomest heads in the world. Prejudiced in his favor? No, not a bit. His hands, for instance, are great laborer's hands, freckled too; I don't like his gait either,--indeed, a dozen things. What we talked about? Well, as I said, he listened mostly; laughed with a great joyous boyish laugh, with a deep musical note in it. He has a deferential manner and a very caressing smile; a trick, too, of throwing back his head and tossing his crest of hair. Why he laughed? Well, I suppose I made him. I told him all about myself; turned myself inside out, good and bad alike, as one might the pocket of an old gown; laughed at my own expense, hid nothing. An extraordinary thing to do, was it? I suppose it was; but the whole thing was rather unusual. He got up and walked about, sometimes he thrust his hands in his pockets and exclaimed, 'The Deuce!' etc. I fancy he learned a good deal about me in a few hours. You see it was not as if one were talking to a stranger; it was as if one had met part of one's self one had lost for a long time, and was filling up the gaps made during the absence. You can't