Thorley Masterman pondered on the words Lois had written him as he tramped along the bluffs above the Mississippi, with the towers and spires of Minneapolis looming like battlements through the haze of an afternoon at the end of June. He had left the conference on new methods of treating the thyroid gland which was being held in St. Paul in order to think his position out. Having motored over from his hotel in Minneapolis, he preferred to "tramp it" back. The glorious wooded way on the St. Paul side of the river was in itself an invitation to his strong, striding limbs, while the wine of Western air and the stimulus of Western energy quickened the savage outdoor impulse so ready to leap in his blood. The song of mating birds quickened it, too, and the romance of the river gliding through the gorge below, and the beauty of the cities eying each other like embattled queens from headland across to headland and through the splendor of the promise of a gold-and-purple sunset.
It was a great setting for great thoughts, inspiring ideas so large that when he reached his hotel he found them too big to reduce easily to paper.
"You ask me what love is, and say you don't know. I'm more daring than you in that I think I do know. I know two or three things about it, even if I don't know all.
"For one thing, I know that no one can do more than say what love is for himself. You can't say what it is for me, or isn't, or must be, or ought to be. That's my secret. I can't always share it, or at any rate share it all, even with the person I love. But neither can I say what it is, or isn't, or should be, or must be, for you. You have your secret. No two people love in the same way, or get precisely the same kind of joy or sorrow from loving. Since love is the flower of personality, it has the same infinite variety that personalities possess. We give one thing and we get back another. Do not some of our irritations—I'm not speaking of you and me in particular—arise from the fact that, giving one thing, we expect to get the same thing back, when all the while no one else has that special quality to offer? The flower is different according to the plant that produces it. When the pine-tree loved the palm there was more than the distance to make the one a mystery to the other.
"Of the two things essential to love, the first, so it seems to me, is that what one gives should be one's best—the very blossom of one's soul. It may have the hot luxuriance of the hibiscus, or the flame of the wild azalea in the woods, or no more than the mildly scented, flowerless bloom of the elm or the linden that falls like manna in the roadway. Each has its beauties and its limitations; but it is worth noticing that each serves its purpose in life's infinite profusion as nothing else could serve it to that particular end. The elm lends something to the hibiscus—the hibiscus to the elm. Neither can expect back what it gives to the other. Perfection is accomplished when each offers what it can.
"Which brings me to the remaining thing I know about love—that it exists in offering. Love is the desire to go outward, to pour forth, to express, to do, to contribute. It has no system of calculation and no yard-stick for the little more or the little less. It is spontaneous and irrepressible and overflowing, and loses the extraordinary essence that makes it truly love when it weighs and measures and inspects too closely the quality of its return. It is in the fact that love is its own sufficiency, its own joy, its own compensation for all its pain, that I find it divine. The one point on which I can fully accept your Christian theology is that your God is love. Given a God who is Love and a Love that is God, I can see Him as worthy to be worshiped. Call Him, then, by any name you please—Jehovah, Allah, Krishna, Christ—you still have the Essence, the Thing. Love to be love must feel itself infinite, or as nearly infinite as anything human can be. When I can't pour it out in that way—when I pause to reflect how far I can go, or reach a point beyond which I see that I cannot go any further—I do not truly love."
Having written this much, he laid down his pen and considered. He had said nothing personal, unless it was by implication. It was only after long meditation that he decided to leave the matter there. The prime question was no longer as to whether or not he loved her, but as to whether or not she loved him. That was for her to decide. It was for her to decide without his urging or tormenting. He began to feel not only too sensitive on the subject, but too proud to make appeals to which she would probably listen out of generosity. Since he had been in the wrong, it was for her to make the advances; and so he ended his letter and posted it.
The discussion continued throughout the correspondence that ensued while he migrated from Minneapolis to Milwaukee, from Milwaukee to Denver, and from Denver to Colorado Springs. It was partly from curiosity of travel that he zigzagged in this way across the country, and partly to make it plain to Lois without saying it that he awaited her permission to come home. That he should be obliged to return one day, without her permission if not with it, was a matter of course, but it would make the meeting easier if she summoned him. As a hint that she could do so and have no fear, he asked her in a postscript to one of his letters to tell him, when she next wrote, what was happening to Rosie Fay.
To this she replied as simply and straightforwardly as he had put the question, imparting all that Jim Breen had told her and whatever she had gleaned for herself, adding as a seeming afterthought in the letter she wrote next day:
"If Rosie could bring herself to marry Jim it would be the happiest of all solutions, and make things easier for Claude. I think she will. If so, it won't be so much because her heart will have been caught in the rebound as that the poor little thing is mentally and emotionally exhausted, and glad to creep into the arms of any strong, good man who will love her and take care of her. Just to be able to do that much will be enough for Jim. I see a good deal of him; so I know. Every time he brings an order of new plants we have a little talk—always about Rosie. His love is of the kind you wrote about the other day; it has no yard-stick for the little more or the little less in the return. Perhaps men can love like that more easily than women do. Uncle Sim seemed to hint one evening that there is generally a selfish strain in a woman's love, in that what it gets is more precious to it than what it gives. I wonder."