Dear Judy:
This letter has nothing to do with the John Grier Home. It's merely from Sallie McBride.
Do you remember when we read Huxley's letters our senior year? That book contained a phrase which has stuck in my memory ever since: "There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that one either weathers or wrecks oneself on." It's terribly true; and the trouble is that you can't always recognize your Cape Horn when you see it. The sailing is sometimes pretty foggy, and you're wrecked before you know it.
I've been realizing of late that I have reached the Cape Horn of my own life. I entered upon my engagement to Gordon honestly and hopefully, but little by little I've grown doubtful of the outcome. The girl he loves is not the ME I want to be. It's the ME I've been trying to grow away from all this last year. I'm not sure she ever really existed. Gordon just imagined she did. Anyway, she doesn't exist any more, and the only fair course both to him and to myself was to end it.
We no longer have any interests in common; we are not friends. He doesn't comprehend it; he thinks that I am making it up, that all I have to do is to take an interest in his life, and everything will turn out happily. Of course I do take an interest when he's with me. I talk about the things he wants to talk about, and he doesn't know that there's a whole part of me—the biggest part of me—that simply doesn't meet him at any point. I pretend when I am with him. I am not myself, and if we were to live together in constant daily intercourse, I'd have to keep on pretending all my life. He wants me to watch his face and smile when he smiles and frown when he frowns. He can't realize that I'm an individual just as much as he is.
I have social accomplishments. I dress well, I'm spectacular, I would be an ideal hostess in a politician's household—and that's why he likes me.
Anyway, I suddenly saw with awful distinctness that if I kept on I'd be in a few years where Helen Brooks is. She's a far better model of married life for me to contemplate just this moment than you, dear Judy. I think that such a spectacle as you and Jervis is a menace to society. You look so happy and peaceful and companionable that you induce a defenseless onlooker to rush off and snap up the first man she meets—and he's always the wrong man.
Anyway, Gordon and I have quarreled definitely and finally. I should rather have ended without a quarrel, but considering his temperament,—and mine, too, I must confess,—we had to go off in a big smoky explosion. He came yesterday afternoon, after I'd written him not to come, and we went walking over Knowltop. For three and a half hours we paced back and forth over that windy moor and discussed ourselves to the bottommost recesses of our beings. No one can ever say the break came through misunderstanding each other!
It ended by Gordon's going, never to return. As I stood there at the end and watched him drop out of sight over the brow of the hill, and realized that I was free and alone and my own master well, Judy, such a sense of joyous relief, of freedom, swept over me! I can't tell you; I don't believe any happily married person could ever realize how wonderfully, beautifully ALONE I felt. I wanted to throw my arms out and embrace the whole waiting world that belonged suddenly to me. Oh, it is such a relief to have it settled! I faced the truth the night of the fire when I saw the old John Grier go, and realized that a new John Grier would be built in its place and that I wouldn't be here to do it. A horrible jealousy clutched at my heart. I couldn't give it up, and during those agonizing moments while I thought we had lost our doctor, I realized what his life meant, and how much more significant than Gordon's. And I knew then that I couldn't desert him. I had to go on and carry out all of the plans we made together.
I don't seem to be telling you anything but a mess of words, I am so full of such a mess of crowding emotions. I want to talk and talk and talk myself into coherence. But, anyway, I stood alone in the winter twilight, and I took a deep breath of clear cold air, and I felt beautifully, wonderfully, electrically free.