"I know just how you feel!"
Such was the woman Letitia confided in, now that her tongue was loosened and the mystery solved, for her soul was brimming with those new visions—dreams so roseate as she painted them that my wife listened with their wonder mirrored in her round brown eyes, and dumb before that eloquence. Dove loved Letitia as a greater woman than herself, she said, worshipped her for her wider knowledge and more fluent speech, just as she wondered at it ruefully as a girl on Sun Dial listening to Letitia's tales of dryads and their spells. In return for all this rapt attention and modest reverence, Letitia formerly had been grace itself. It was a tender tyranny she had exercised; but now?—how should my simple, earthly Dove, mother and housewife, confide any longer her favorite cares, her gentle fears, her innocent regrets? With what balm of sympathy and cheer would the new Letitia heal those wounds? Would not their very existence be denied; or worse, be held as evidence of sin?—iniquity in my poor girl's soul, hidden there like a worm i' the bud, and to be chastened in no wise save by taking invisible white wings of thought, and soaring—God knows where?
The new Letitia was not unamiable, nor yet unkind, knowingly, for she smiled consistently upon all about her—a strange, aloof, unloving smile though, at which we sighed. We should have liked her to be heart and soul again in our old-time common pleasures, even to have joined us now and then in a fault or two—to have looked less icily, for example, upon our occasional petty gossip of our neighbors, or to have added one wrathful word to our little rages at the way the world was straying from the golden mist we had seen it turn in, in our youth. As we watched her, wondering, laughing sometimes, sometimes half-angry at this new and awful guise she had assumed, it would come to us, not so much how sadly earthen we must seem to her, nor yet how strange and daft and airy her new views seemed to us in our duller sight—but how the old Letitia whom we had loved was gone forever.
"Bertram," said my wife one evening as we sat together by the lamp, "what do you think Letitia says?"
"I am prepared for anything, my dear."
Dove, who was sewing, laid down her work and said, gravely:
"She does not believe in marriage any more."
I raised my eyebrows. There was really nothing to be said.
"At least," my wife went on, resuming her sewing, "she says that the time will come when the race will have"—Dove paused thoughtfully—"risen above such things, I think she said. I really don't remember the words she used, but I believe—yes, there will be marriage—in a way—that is"—Dove knitted her brows—"a union of kindred souls, if I understand her."
"Ah!" I replied. "I see. But what about the perpetuation—"