My dear friend Gerald,
What I want principally to say is just don’t worry. Don’t worry for fear I’ll come, and don’t worry for fear I won’t understand, and don’t worry because you think my feelings may be hurt. And above all the rest, don’t worry about gratitude, for I don’t 315feel you owe me any at all. Don’t you think for a moment that I saved your life. You were not as sick as you imagine, I guess. It was a very light case, or how would you have got over it so soon? You were not near as sick, according to all accounts, as poor Busteretto, who has been having what they call here the cimurro. I took you in hand because I am a nurse and I couldn’t keep my hands off, just as an old fire-engine horse will start to gallop when he hears a fire-alarm even if he isn’t on the job. If it had been Italo Ceccherelli who was sick I would have been tempted in just the same way; so you see there is no occasion for gratitude. Put it out of your mind.
Now about the thing I took from the drawer of your night-stand. I am very sorry I can’t give it back, because I flung it out in the middle of the river. That is what I did with it, and I am not sorry either. You know that we at home don’t look upon certain things as you apparently do over here. We think it a disgrace for a man to kill himself. I myself am old-fashioned enough to think that that door leads to hell. I have been astonished to find that over here it is thought quite respectable, that some Italians look upon it as an honorable way, for instance, of paying their debts, and a natural way of getting over an unhappy love-affair. As I know you have a good many foreign ideas, and as you have once or twice made a remark that showed me you thought of that solution of difficulties as a possible one, I grabbed your nasty old pistol when I found it in the little drawer, and it reposes now at the bottom of the Arno. Don’t get another, Gerald. No burglars are going to enter your house to steal your Roman tear-bottle or your books. When you are so blue you feel like killing yourself, say your prayers. I am very glad 316your friend the abbé is going to come and stay with you. He is a good influence, I feel sure, and a good friend.
I suppose I shall see you again some time, even if I don’t do the visiting. But don’t be in any hurry, not on my account. I hope that in the meantime you will get back your strength quickly. Remember that you will have to be very careful for quite a long time, because a relapse is an awfully mean thing.
Good-by, my dear Gerald. Please accept the very best wishes of
Yours sincerely,
Aurora Hawthorne.
P.S. I did not write four letters and tear three of them up, like you. I wrote one and corrected it, and here I have copied it out for you, hoping that in it I have made my meaning as clear to you as you made yours clear to me in your letter.