Chapter XCVII: Section 8: Another day, there would be moods of peace, and even of

merriment; it was always like putting one’s hand into a grab-bag, to open a new letter from Corydon. In after years he would read them, and strange were the memories they brought!

“My Thyrsis,” she wrote: “I have been reading a story of Heine in Zangwill’s “Dreamers of the Ghetto”. I did not know about Heine. He loved and married a sweet little woman of the people--Mathilde--who didn’t appreciate his writings. I am not only going to love you, but I am going to appreciate your writings! Some day I am going to be educated--and won’t it be fine when I am educated?

“I keep very busy, but I have not so much time as I had last summer. I live almost all my life in hope--the present is nothing. I think I get more strength by gazing at my baby than in any other way. I wonder if I can ever infuse into him my inspiration and my desire. It is wonderfully exciting to me to think of what a free soul could do, if it possessed my spirit and my dreams. Ah, even you don’t know! I smile to myself when I think how surprised you might some day be! Oh, my baby, my baby, surely you will not fail me--little soul that is to be. This is what I say to him, and then I squeeze him in ecstasy, and he coughs up his milk. Dear funny little thing, that is so pleased with a red, white and blue rattle. At present he is grinning at it ecstatically--and he is truly most horribly cunning. His favorite expression is ‘Ah-boo, ah-boo’; and is not that just _too_ bright? Everybody tries to spoil him--even a twelve-year-old boy here wanted to kiss him. And wonder of wonders, he has two teeth appearing in his lower gums! Poor me--he bites hard enough as he is.”

And then again:

“My Beloved: I am sitting with my candle once more. It is too hot for a lamp. I have been reading ‘Paradise Lost’, and truly I am astonished that it is so beautiful. Also I have been reading a book about Unitarianism, and I did not know that such things had been written. But I think it is hardly worth while to call one’s self a Unitarian. I was thinking that I will go back and read the Bible through. I would not mind, if I knew I did not have to believe it.

“Also; this week, I read ‘Paul and Virginia’. Oh, do not write anything to me about our meeting, until you are sure it can be! It breaks my heart.

“Did it ever occur to you that we might embark for the tropics? We’d have a hut, and I might learn to raise fruits and vegetables. I sigh for some verdant isle--and I am not joking. We might find some place where steamers came now and then, and some one in New York could attend to your manuscripts.

“To-night I was trying to put my baby to sleep and he wouldn’t go, but just lay in my lap and kicked and grinned. I tried to coax him to go to sleep, but if I was the least bit impatient he’d begin to cry. And then he’d grin at me so roguishly, as if to say, ‘Let’s play before I go to sleep!’ Finally I looked right at him and said, ‘Now, you have played long enough, and I wish you to be a good boy and go to sleep!’ And then he laughed, and I put him on his side and he went to sleep! Wasn’t that bright for a baby just seven months old?

“I think I write you much more interesting letters than you write me. To be sure I have no books into which to put my thoughts. Also, I have a great deal of time to compose letters to you; Cedric wakes me up so much in the night, and often I cannot go to sleep again. It plays havoc with me as a rule; and yet sometimes, when I’m not too exhausted, there is a certain joy in watching by the dim candle light the rosy upturned face and the little groping mouth. Oh Thyrsis, he is all mine and yours, and we must make him glad he was borned, mustn’t we?”