Your Husband’s Love Letters

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12406, 27 March 1926, Page 15

Your Husband’s Love Letters

By

Evelyn Vivian

I fancy the answer of most women would be in the negative. However sentimental we may have been, and in whatsoever degree we may retain that tender streak, it is seldom indeed'that we can recapture the first fine careless rapture by reading over the loveletters of the sweetheart who becamo the husband.

Why do we almost invariably burn them? Who knows? There must be moments in middleage when shear curiosity alone moves us to regret the gesture of destruction. It Is so remote—that youth of ours. What \ manner of man and maiden met-—and kissed—those many years agone? And sometimes a feeling deeper than that is stirred in moments of depression. A passe wife might find equal measure of consolation with regret for.the vanished, past; the memory of golden hours revivified in the written word.

Very few men write love-letters that have the smallest olaim to literary charm. Most of them wrote spontaneously and with gauche hut sincere

tendresse in the early courting days, when life and love were mingled in the same dream. Those forgotten utterances, for many life-weary women, would have the_ mystic appeal of the almost incredible in days when the morning meal in silence, and the evening meal, conducted upon somewhat more sociable lines, make up the sum and sameness of the hours.

Today we may still be loyally and devotedly appreciated; but in that remote yesterday, we were loved. Loved as are the heroines of stage and fiction

to whom we turn for our vicarious middle-age romance. Loved in tho same atmospheric setting of moonshine, with a dream-background of roses and lilao and apple-blossom and the glow of heart’s desire.

Alight it not all come back to ns, the lingering fragranhe of the romance of long ago, and with it, something of the large tolerance that love engendered in those halcyon days?— if the ashes hadn’t been carried away on a dustcart!