“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 I am 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 are 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 myself alone....
“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 I am 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 cannot tell whether they were written 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.