It’s been said that “nothing is mysterious, no human relation, except love,” which is a dynamic language that has to be learned. As a lover of love letters, I was infinitely delighted, while perusing the Printed Ephemera collection of the Library of Congress, to chance upon an ingenious specimen from the 1850s bridging the mystery and language of love in a cryptographic masterpiece.

The missive was allegedly penned by a resourceful young man courting the daughter an overbearing and protective father — one imagines a stern Victorian patriarch. Knowing that all of his beloved’s correspondence would have to pass parental decency tests, the young bachelor cleverly engineered his language so that the letter could be read two ways — line by line, as the unsuspecting father would, which renders the text a contemptuous disavowal of romance, or by skipping over all even-numbered lines and reading only the odds, which transmogrifies the message into a passionate declaration of love. Hats off to you, sir.

One can only imagine the kind of field day Oscar Wilde would’ve had with this idea, had he cared to make his own love letters less scandalous.