What if I should tell my last, my very recent experience with the other
sex? I received a paper containing the inner history of a young woman's
life, the evolution of her consciousness from its earliest record of
itself, written so thoughtfully, so sincerely, with so much firmness and
yet so much delicacy, with such truth of detail and such grace in the
manner of telling, that I finished the long manuscript almost at a
sitting, with a pleasure rarely, almost never experienced in voluminous
communications which one has to spell out of handwriting. This was from
a correspondent who made my acquaintance by letter when she was little
more than a child, some years ago. How easy at that early period to have
silenced her by indifference, to have wounded her by a careless epithet,
perhaps even to have crushed her as one puts his heel on a weed! A very
little encouragement kept her from despondency, and brought back one of
those overflows of gratitude which make one more ashamed of himself for
being so overpaid than he would be for having committed any of the lesser
sins. But what pleased me most in the paper lately received was to see
how far the writer had outgrown the need of any encouragement of mine;
that she had strengthened out of her tremulous questionings into a
self-reliance and self-poise which I had hardly dared to anticipate for
her.
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