Margaret to Daunt.
“‘The Beeches,’ Warne.
“I have been touched by your last letter. I had not intended to write again, yet somehow it seems as if I must. Can you read between these lines that I am unhappy? I have been to blame, Richard, so much to blame; but I didn’t know it till afterward.
“I can’t answer your question; it isn’t whether I love you—it’s how. Doesn’t that tell you anything? I mustn’t be mistaken in the way. You must not try to see me; it would only make me more wretched than I am now, and that is a great deal more than I could ever tell you.
“M.”
Daunt to Margaret.
“If you won’t have any pity for yourself, for heaven’s sake have some for me! What am I to do? I haven’t any philosophy to bear on the situation. I can’t understand your objections. Your way of reasoning your emotions is simply ghastly. The Lord never intended them to be reasoned with! We can’t think ourselves into love or out of it either. At least I can’t. I’ve gone too far to go backward. Since you went I have been one long misery—one long, aching homesickness.
“You ask me not to ‘humiliate’ you by asking for your reasons. Don’t you think I am humiliated? Don’t you think I suffer, too? And yet it isn’t that; my love isn’t so mean a thing that it is my vanity that is hurt most. If I believed you didn’t love me, that might be; but if you could leave me as you have—without a chance to speak, with nothing but a line or two that only maddened me—you wouldn’t hesitate to tell me the truth now.
“You do love me, Margaret! You’re torturing yourself and torturing me with some absurd hallucination. Forgive me, dear—I don’t mean that—only it’s all so puzzling and it hurts me so! I’m all raw and bleeding. My nerves are all jangles.