drive one mad if ungratified. During my first months in Rome I suffered from acute and morbid nostalgia; but now I have been home for a while and have come back almost cured."
"I don't know———," I said; "such nostalgia as I have felt has been quite harmless."
"Then there must be several kinds, some harmless, some dangerous," conceded the young lady with a smile; and she continued rather shyly: "but our whole existence is one long chain of nostalgia—don't you think so? The nostalgia of yesterday, the nostalgia of to-morrow; the longing for what is lost, the yearning for what can never be attained———"
After this first visit we saw Regina several times. I liked her, she was so clever and original; but to you she proved unsympathetic. "I can't see clearly into her life," you complained to me more than once.
This much we learned about her. Her husband was far from rich and she had brought him but a slender dowry, yet they rented a handsome Apartment and lived almost luxuriously. We, on the other hand, who worked hard and between us made an income the double of theirs, were content with the modest life of poor artists; gladdened indeed—like the careless existence of the birds building in the laurel below our windows—by the songs of love and the mere joy of living and struggling on in good hope of victory.
Remembering, as I minutely do, the whole simple romance of our early married life—on this day when we have attained to almost all our hopes (a little by my good-will, chiefly by your intelligence and activity, never by stooping to any transaction disapproved by our conscience)—to you, dear comrade of my work and of
