I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of Nan-nan’s drawing of the blinds:  wait till she is gone (the old darling potters and tattles:  it is her most possessive moment of me in the day, except when I sham headaches, and let her put me to bed); then I have my hand under my pillow and draw out your last for a reading that has lost count whether it is the twenty-second or the fifty-second time;—­discover new beauties in it, and run to the glass to discover new beauties in myself,—­find them; Benjy comes up with the post’s latest, and behold, my day is begun!

Is that the sort of thing you want to know?  My days are without an action worth naming:  I only think swelling thoughts, and write some of them:  if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure I run a pen-and-ink race to tell you.  No, it is man who does things; a woman only diddles (to adapt a word of diminutive sound for the occasion), unless, good, fortunate, independent thing, she works for her own living:  and that is not me!

I feel sometimes as if a real bar were between me and a whole conception of life; because I have carpets and curtains, and Nan-nan, and Benjy, and last of all you—­shutting me out from the realities of existence.

If you would all leave me just for one full moon, and come back to me only when I am starving for you all—­for my tea to be brought to me in the morning, and all the paddings and cushionings which bolster me up from morning till night—­with what a sigh of wisdom I would drop back into your arms, and would let you draw the rose-colored curtains round me again!

Now I am afraid lest I have become too happy:  I am leaning so far out of window to welcome the dawn, I seem to be tempting a fall—­heaven itself to fall upon me.

What do I know truly, who only know so much happiness?

Dearest, if there is anything else in love which I do not know, teach it me quickly:  I am utterly yours.  If there is sorrow to give, give it me!  Only let me have with it the consciousness of your love.

Oh, my dear, I lose myself if I think of you so much.  What would life have without you in it?  The sun would drop from my heavens.  I see only by you! you have kissed me on the eyes.  You are more to me than my own poor brain could ever have devised:  had I started to invent Paradise, I could not have invented you.  But perhaps you have invented me:  I am something new to myself since I saw you first.  God bless you for it!

Even if you were to shut your eyes at me now—­though I might go blind, you could not unmake me:—­“The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.”  Also that I am yours is a gift of the gods, I will trust:  and so, not to be recalled!

Kiss me, dearest; here where I have written this!  I am yours, Beloved.  I kiss you again and again.—­Ever your own making.

LETTER XIX.