Perhaps he thought of that at the same moment as myself, for
the golden light of my mother's memory lay always about him. For some
moments we did not speak. I think we were both weeping.
At length I tried to tell him what had happened--hiding nothing,
softening nothing, speaking the simple and naked truth. I found it
impossible to do so. My odd-sounding voice was not like my own, and even
my words seemed to be somebody else's. But Father Dan understood
everything.
"I know! I know!" he said, and then, to my great relief, interrupting my
halting explanations, he gave his own interpretation of my husband's
letter.
There was a higher love and there was a lower love and both were
necessary to God's plans and purposes. But the higher love must come
first, or else the lower one would seem to be cruel and gross and
against nature.
Nature was kind to a young girl. Left to itself it awakened her sex very
gently. First with love, which came to her like a whisper in a dream,
like the touch of an angel on her sleeping eyelids, so that when she
awoke to the laws of life the mysteries of sex did not startle or appal
her.
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