"Not more so than I, for I made up my mind to marry thee, and, I fear me, thought more of myself than of thee." She looked with compassion, I thought, upon me.
"I would be thy wife, no matter what comes," said she.
"Feeling for me all that a wife should feel for her husband?"
"Yea."
Then I stood by Barbara while she wiped her eyes upon my sleeve.
For a day or so I felt constrained at friend Hicks's house, but when I saw his daughter the same as usual, kind and considerate—perhaps more considerate than usual to me—I bethought me that perchance a Friend is at times a trifle too circumspect in his words, a trifle too circumscribed in his actions. He must be seemly in his carriage and speech, must not allow unbecoming emotion to prey upon him, must build the body from the spirit, and not the spirit from the body. I had tried to do all these, and yet there were times when sensation overpowered calculation, and it would have afforded me peace to have held friend Barbara within my arms and said many foolish and irrelevant words, and heard such words from her. Sometimes it seems to me that three feet apart, two feet, one, two inches, one, is too much from one who is exceedingly much to us: the mere touch of hand to hand, unmeaning as such a thing is, may be infinitely more than a mere gratification of sense. Still, I would not have it understood that I am a militant spirit, fond of what stubborn folk term "progression," nor would I throw aside any of the rules which have been mine and those of many generations of ancestors who followed George Fox and knew his intents to be pure withal.
But I was to go away East now, and my preparations were completed.
"I hope thee will bear in mind that I shall often think of thee, friend Barbara," I said on the last evening I should see her for a long time.
The dints in her face looked very comely as she answered, "I shall, friend Biddle."
"And thee will think of me?"