Young Knox wrote to Sylvia because he was in love with her, which is the best of all reasons for writing when love is right, and the worst imaginable when it is wrong. He was so much in love that as soon as she was out of his sight his first impulse was to set down on paper all sorts of things which had very little sense in them, but made up for a famine of wisdom by a corresponding plenty of feeling. There is something almost pathetic in the humbleness of a young man’s strength before the object of his first true love. It is the abasement of the real before the ideal; but if the ideal fails, the real takes vengeance of the man for having trodden it under.
Young women rarely understand their power; older ones too often overrate what they have. The girl who first breathes the air of the outer world and first sees in a man’s eyes that he loves her, knows that he is stronger, better taught, more experienced than she is, and compares herself with him by a measure which he rates as nothing. Man is much more real to woman, when both are very young, than woman is to man; and being real he represents to her a sort of material force. But to him she is an imaginary being, strong with a mystic influence from which he cannot escape when he has come within the pentagram of the spell. It is bad for a man if she comes to know her strength before he has learned his weakness. Then she riots in it, recklessly, for a time, until she has hurt him. She says, ’Do this,’ and he does it, like the Centurion’s servant; or ’Say this,’ and he says it, be the words wise or foolish, and she reckons his wisdom to herself and his folly to him, frankly, and without the least doubt of her own perfection, for a while, rejoicing senselessly in driving him. But by and by, as in a clock, the mainspring feels the gentle regulation of the swaying balance, and the balance takes its motion from the spring, till both together move in perfect time, while each without the other would be but a useless bit of machinery. Sylvia did not know all that, and if she had, she would perhaps not have reasoned about it much. She did not understand why young Knox wrote that he would live for her, die for her, and, if necessary, convulse the solar system for her exclusive pleasure and benefit. It seemed a great deal to promise under the circumstances, and her moderate maiden vanity could not make her appear, in her own eyes, as an adequate cause of such serious disturbance in the order of things; yet it was not displeasing to be magnified into a possible source of astronomical miracles, though the idea was slightly ridiculous and she was glad that she had it entirely to herself and beyond carping criticism.