LETTER LXIV.

Dearest:  It is dreadful to own that I was glad at first to know that you and your mother were no longer together, glad of something that must mean pain to you!  I am not now.  When you were ill I did a wrong thing:  from her something came to me which I returned.  I would do much to undo that act now; but this has fixed it forever.  With it were a few kind words.  I could not bear to accept praise from her:  all went back to her!  Oh, poor thing, poor thing! if I ever had an enemy I thought it was she!  I do not think so now.  Those who seem cold seldom are.  I hope you were with her at the last:  she loved you beyond any word that was in her nature to utter, and the young are hard on the old without knowing it.  We were two people, she and I, whose love clashed jealously over the same object, and we both failed.  She is the first to get rest.

LETTER LXV.

My Dear:  I dream of you now every night, and you are always kind, always just as I knew you:  the same without a shadow of change.

I cannot picture you anyhow else, though my life is full of the silence you have made.  My heart seems to have stopped on the last beat the sight of your handwriting gave it.

I dare not bid you come back now:  sorrow has made me a stranger to myself.  I could not look at you and say “I am your Star":—­I could not believe it if I said it.  Two women have inhabited me, and the one here now is not the one you knew and loved:  their one likeness is that they both have loved the same man, the one certain that her love was returned, and the other certain of nothing.  What a world of difference lies in that!

I lay hands on myself, half doubting, and feel my skeleton pushing to the front:  my glass shows it me.  Thus we are all built up:  bones are at the foundations of our happiness, and when the happiness wears thin, they show through, the true architecture of humanity.

I have to realize now that I have become the greatest possible failure in life,—­a woman who has lost her “share of the world”:  I try to shape myself to it.

It is deadly when a woman’s sex, what was once her glory, reveals itself to her as an all-containing loss.  I realized myself fully only when I was with you; and now I can’t undo it.—­You gone, I lean against a shadow, and feel myself forever falling, drifting to no end, a Francesca without a Paolo.  Well, it must be some comfort that I do not drag you with me.  I never believed myself a “strong” woman; your lightest wish shaped me to its liking.  Now you have molded me with your own image and superscription, and have cast me away.