The Day of His Youth

								

Nonsense, doubled and trebled! You know enough of me. Be content to
take me as I seem, and not as I am in the world's eyes and in my own;
then you will the longer think me worthy to walk your Arden Forest. Not
that I have anything to conceal. I am no more very bad than very good;
but it is the tragic consequence of living in this world that
(especially if we be men! you, sir, I mean you!) we idealize and then
weigh--admire, laud to the skies, and then shove under the lens--only
to find that all flesh is dust, and differeth not, except so much as
sea-sand and mountain-loam. So be content to know this only about me:
that I am five years your senior (a quarter-century, ye gods!), that I
am poor and once was ambitious; that I earned my bread, as governess
and intermittent literary hack, until a year ago, when a tiny fortune
was left me by a relative whom the immortals loved not, since he lived
so long; that I have written three novels, moderately successful, and
am burning to find out whether I can write a play; and, last of all,
that my aunt invited me down here to spend this summer in what she
calls communion with nature. There! the chapter is closed. Be
egotistical, you; but suffer me to talk about things seen and heard,
not of those pertaining to the particle Me. Tell me everything you
will, and without restraint. I may not criticise your style, though I
shall watch to see it develop into something fine.
[Sidenote: Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose]
Your letter! no, mine, as nothing has ever been mine since I was born,
for it was conceived for me and moulded for my eyes only. The words you
have said to me, even in those long hours on the lake, under the rose
of sunset, are tantalizingly lost, though I try to recall them as I lie
at night looking at the sky from my bed; I know their sense, their
sound, yet something sweetly personal is gone, like a fragrance
escaped. This is mine: transcript of your beautiful soul upon a page
less white. But though we talk all day on the lake and half the night
by camp-fires under the moon, what can I say to you on this cold paper
and with this dull pen? Ah, but the thoughts I send you! The winged
invisible messengers that go speeding between us in those silent hours
when my father sleeps, and I lie in my tent watching the solemn top of
the great pine, and over it the stars! Those messages will never be
told; earth has no speech for them. They are beyond the scope of music.
Yet there must be speech for them somewhere. They are like the
overtones we cannot hear unless our ears are delicately attuned; and if
you, in your tent, were lying in an ecstasy of waiting for them as I in
a rapture of sending, then would you not hear? But the thought is too
great, too terrible. That would be as if we were gods, to taste no more
of earthly chills and languors. Do you know what has happened to me
since I saw you first? I have grown blind to the rest of this little