The response from Alice was what he expected, tender, sweet, domestic, and it was full of praise of Evelyn, of love for her.  “Perhaps, dear Phil,” she wrote, “I shall love her more than I do you.  I almost think —­did I not remember what a bad boy you could be sometimes—­that each one of you is too good for the other.  But, Phil, if you should ever come to think that she is not too good for you, you will not be good enough for her.  I can’t think she is perfect, any more than you are perfect—­you will find that she is just a woman—­but there is nothing in all life so precious as such a heart as hers.  You will come here, of course, and at once, whenever it is.  You know that big, square, old-fashioned corner chamber, with the high-poster.  That is yours.  Evelyn never saw it.  The morning and the evening sun shoot across it, and the front windows look on the great green crown of Mount Peak.  You know it.  There is not such a place in the world to hear the low and peaceful murmur of the river, all night long, rushing, tumbling, crooning, I used to think when I was a little girl and dreamed of things unseen, and still going on when the birds begin to sing in the dawn.  And with Evelyn!  Dear Phil!”

It was in another strain, but not less full of real affection, that Celia wrote: 

“I am not going to congratulate you.  You are long past the need of that.  But you know that I am happy in having you happy.  You thought I never saw anything?  I wonder if men are as blind as they seem to be?  And I had fears.  Do you know a man ought to build his own monument.  If he goes into a monument built for him, that is the end of him.  Now you can work, and you will.  I am so glad she isn’t an heiress any more.  I guess there was a curse on that fortune.  But she has eluded it.  I believe all you tell me about her.  Perhaps there are more such women in the world than you think.  Some day I shall know her, and soon.  I do long to see her.  Love her I feel sure I shall.

“You ask about myself.  I am the same, but things change.  When I get my medical diploma I shall decide what to do.  My little property just suffices, with economy, and I enjoy economy.  I doubt if I do any general practice for pay.  There are so many young doctors that need the money for practice more than I do.  And perhaps taking it up as a living would make me sort of hard and perfunctory.  And there is so much to do in this great New York among the unfortunate that a woman who knows medicine can do better than any one else.

“Ah, me, I am happy in a way, or I expect to be.  Everybody—­it isn’t because I am a woman I say this—­needs something to lean on now and then.  There isn’t much to lean on in the college, nor in many of my zealous and ambitious companions there.  There is more faith in the poor people down in the wards where I go.  They are kind to each other, and most of them, not all, believe in something.  They, have that, at any rate, in all their trials and poverty.  Philip, don’t despise the invisible.  I have got into the habit of going into a Catholic church down there, when I am tired and discouraged, and getting the peace of it.  It is a sort of open door!  You need not jump to the conclusion that I am ‘going over.’  Maybe I am going back.  I don’t know.  I have always you know, been looking for something.