The Day of His Youth

								

elsewhere, either to smoke, run for office, write a book, or worship
another woman. Never imagine that I decry men and exalt my own poor
kind. Woman is the more constant only because she has been taught,
through nature and inheritance, to give once and forever; and God made
man to be gregarious.
I have told you my friend's secret. Now I will tell you mine. There is
a man in the world--not you--who holds for me the fascination we are
accustomed to call love. God knows, it is an earth-born attraction, for
he is one who loves himself far more than he even professes to love me,
and there is not one higher aspiration of my soul to which he would
minister. He would tire of me, and he would break my heart. Therefore I
will have none of him, though a mighty hand seems ever dragging me
toward him, and though that part of me which is in love with the
intoxications of life bids me make one throw for happiness and then die
in despair. And neither will I have aught of you, though you seem to me
a young St. Michael with lance of honor and shield of strength.
[Sidenote: Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose]
I do not know why, but for some reason your letter has not killed my
hope. Perhaps it would have done so, but I took it into the woods, the
deeper woods, where I have begun to go of late to be wholly alone. For
now even the tents by day-light seem to me like multitudes of eyes, and
my father, also, breaks in on my dream. So I carried it to the woods
where the light flickered and the shadows of little leaves played upon
their larger mates. They seemed to me like the phantasmagoria of being.
I had not begun to think of such things till I saw you. Life has grown
infinitely sad, as well as infinitely beautiful. It has a haze: the
haze of twilight. Well, the letter! It jarred upon me; that is a matter
of course. It removed you from me, immeasurably, with its hints of a
knowledge which I may never attain. When shall I be your equal, even in
the wisdom of this world? You have known so many people; I only one.
That of itself makes me sad. And then when I came to the inexplicable
fact that there was one you might love, I felt within me a savage pain,
a rising of hot blood, such as I never knew. What was it? Has it a
name? Does it mean a futile passion because life, destiny, have treated
us so brutally, setting you there and me here, so that your loves grew
away from me, and the tendrils of your nature twined another way? And
thus I sat suffering. But soon the wood drew me into her arms. I have
never thought much about beauty; it has always been about me. But of
late it has spoken with a new voice. O the quivering of the blue
sky-patches, the duskiness of shade! The tree-trunks were black from
the morning rain, and everything set upon a stem waved and fluttered,
though so slightly that it was rhythm and not motion. The faint shadow
on the tiarella leaf seemed to me divine; the maiden-hair rustled
greenly, and far off, in other arches, the thrush smote softly on his