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the things we were DOING for the world-had given myself so
unreservedly. You've left me with nothing to DO. Iam suddenly at
loose ends…
"We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life
of my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even
for you and your schemes…
"After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I
ask again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things
up?'…
"It is just as though you were wilfully dead…
"Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at
all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I
might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this
catastrophe impossible…
"Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the begi
and tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a
chance; not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you
and I stood away from. You let my first repugnances repel you…
"It is strange to think after all these years that I should be
asking myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think
I HATE you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake
for a time, thrown it aside. Iam resentful. Unfairly resentful,
for why should I exact that you should watch and understand my life,
when clearly I have understood so little of yours. But Iam savage-
savage at the wrecking of all you were to do.
"Oh, why-why did you give things up?
"No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not
only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great
purposes. They ARE great purposes…
"If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the
strength you had-then indeed I feel I could let you go-you and
your young mistress… All that matters so little to me…
"Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At
times Iam mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit
to give you… I've always hidden my tears from you-and what
was in my heart. It's my nature to hide-and you, you want things
brought to you to see. You are so curious as to be almost cruel.
You don't understand reserves. You have no mercy with restraints
and reservations. You arc not really a CIVILISED man at all. You
hate pretences-and not only pretences but decent coverings…
"It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that
slow people like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't
I bold and reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that,
I suppose, as to ask why my hair is fair…
"I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find
myselfalone…
"My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things-I
shall never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to
have been the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?)
in which you were to forge so much of the new order…
"But, dear, if I can help you-even now-in any way-help both of
you, I mean… It tears me when I think of you poor and
discredited. You will let me help you if I can-it will be the last
wrong not to let me do that…
"You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it-I shall
come after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If Iam a
failure as a wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success
as a district visitor…"
There are other sheets, but I ca
before or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them
have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly
penetrating analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.
"There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want
to. There's this difference that has always been between us, that
you like nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It
goes through everything. You are always TALKING of order and
system, and the splendid dream of the order that might replace the