"The rest is more difficult to tell you. I was insanely happy, then I was intensely miserable. I sent him my portrait and a letter, and counted the days and the hours to a reply. It came. I stole away to read all the warm meaning ill concealed under the words of it; slept with it under my pillow, carried it in my bosom, and answered it straight from my heart. Why try and tell you of the aftertime? I would not go through that winter again for anything in the world. Hope, fear, suspense, joy, despondency,--all the strongest feelings that can torture or wear out a heart were mine. I longed to be up on a high mountain alone with my dream. I wonder does a man ever realize the beauty there is in a woman's thought of him! What kind were the letters? Warm, passionate, yet with a _reservatio mentalis_ that hurt me, but always with a 'When spring comes!' in them. It is amazing to what depths of folly a human being can descend! I had his photograph on my table; I greeted it as a Russian peasant his household saint. It would be hard to find my match in idiocy. I felt a letter coming, and waited with strained ears and fever-racked nerves for the postman's knock. Do you know there is something touchingly pitiful in the way one finds out all the tender bits in a letter and re-reads them? I have kissed a thumb-mark on the paper! Heavens, how the days dragged! I was ill with yearning thought; night brought no rest but the comfort of being alone; all the years of my life were not as long as that weary winter. Sleep fled, and nervous pain took its place. It was foolish, exceedingly foolish, because it was fatal to my looks. At the rare times I looked at myself I got a glimpse of a thin, waxen, yellow face with dark-ringed eyes, and I was certainly older looking. Thinking of it all dispassionately, I am inclined to think I was hysterical. How many of the follies and frailties of women are really due to hysterical rather than moral irresponsibility is a question. You see there is no time of sowing wild oats for women; we repress and repress, and then some day we stumble on the man who just satisfies our sexual and emotional nature, and then there is shipwreck of some sort. When we shall live larger and freer lives we shall be better balanced than we are now. If what I suffered is love, all I can say is I would not ask a better sample of conventional hell's pain. Hu-s-sh! Very well, I won't say those things!