Tenderness and constancy! that, my child, is friendship--it is not love. And I can gather a very good article of friendship from many a wayside bush without going over hot ploughshares to seek it. Listen, and I will tell you exactly how I learned to interpret the later course of passion. I lived and breathed it side by side and heart to heart with a woman once. I will not tell you her name; she is living, and some time you may know her. I had a friend, and I loved her. She married a man who worshiped her, who was intoxicated by her as you are by me. He was her slave, if I may say that of one who took more than he bestowed; but though he absorbed her life and narrowed it in certain ways, he made her divinely happy. So it went on for years, until suddenly, through some new combination of circumstances, they were separated for a time, and he woke up. O telltale phrase in the life of a man! You don't know how much it means now, but you will know. She was dazed, confounded. Not that he was unkind to her; he was a gentleman, though a gentleman grown indifferent. About that time he drifted into friendship with another woman, led thereto, he would have said, by their kindred tastes. Nothing vicious here, nothing to distress the taste of law-abiding citizens; but a tragedy of the soul. I wonder if I can paint it for you. Here was a passionately devoted wife, taught by every act and word and look of years to depend for happiness on one living creature: to turn to him, as to the sun, for life and nourishment. Suddenly the sun was withdrawn, the light went out; she was expected to see by candle. Do not imagine that she betrayed him to me; we are not like that. I knew because she was so dear to me, and I had lived beside her and learned her thoughts. I felt the tragedy as it was enacted, day by day. I saw her poor face sodden with weeping. I suppose she reproached him at first, wildly, in woman's way. I suppose that because I knew him to be angry and bored. But when she saw little winning attentions which had once been hers given to another, I think it began to dawn upon her that they had never meant anything from the first. They were subjective, if I may put it so: a part of the man's nature, the trophy of any one who knew the password. Then the whole woman hardened. She reproached him no more. If he showered on her some of the unspent coin of his affection, she took it graciously, not treasuring it even in thought; because she dared not build again a house upon the sand. Her individuality grew mightily meantime. She became a creature of a wonderful strength and depth of thought; but her heart is dead within her. Sometimes I can see that she is even amused, in a pathetic way, at finding how lightly his indifference can pass over her. Now this was a good man, as men go. He would have scorned a sin larger than this romantic peccadillo,--but he was a man! He had waked up and found himself bored. And so would you! So far as I have