Peace at any price is not the best always; it can be the very worst. And now he is away where there are no letters to answer, not even mine. I haven't had a message of any kind for six weeks—I don't even know where he is.
We live through these things. Thousands of women are eating their hearts out all over the world, just as I am. It is the price of war.
What you tell me about your Anne fills me, not with your disquiet, but with an understanding sympathy. You are feeling a little as I felt when I realised that for a time I had lost the Boy. The period extended over quite a few years from the second year of his school life. The first year he was nothing but a homesick little chap, needing his mother dreadfully. Then he began to stiffen up, his father standing like a comrade by his side.
I never got him back, Cornelia, not as I had him once. He went out very soon into the world of men, and the things he met there I could not share. No woman can. When a man fails his young son during those moulding years of destiny, there is no retrieval. It is the greatest failure in history or in life.
Mine did not fail his son, and I stood by a little wistfully sometimes, bolstering my heart with a vision of the days to be, when the grown man, a child at heart, would creep back to his mother's arms.
But the day never came. I don't mind now, for he belongs to me so utterly. Himself gave him up the day we laid him on the windy hill above the sea; a chapter of his life that was the most radiant had Finis written across the page.
But I got my baby back, and can never lose him again.
You must not worry too much about Anne. Girls pass through quite as many phases as their brothers and some of them are more tiresome. The only child is an object for commiseration rather than for envy. Growth can be retarded, sometimes even stopped, by over cultivation. Anne has had too much waiting on, too much anxiety and sheltering care lavished on her. She is the product of intensive culture.
But her nature is so sweet and wholesome that she'll come out on top yet.
Of course the very best thing that could happen to her, would be to marry a comparatively poor man and have a lot of children, certainly not less than six.