This letter might be written in twenty different ways, but only one is the right way, and now I begin writing to you in the same style as I write in my own poor, dull diary. You know it is only lazy people who can bear to record the barrenness of their daily life in a diary.
Accept my warmest and most sincere congratulations, dear Jeanne, and don’t shed any more tears on my account. You have not transgressed anything, you dear child, with your refined humanity. Neither has he. Yet you fancy that your letters—your “confession,” has caused me pain. Oh, no! Alas! it has done nothing of the kind. I say, alas! because I should so like to believe myself, that I had once in my life loved with my whole heart. Now I see it must have been all imagination. It can’t be explained otherwise—a delusion, a myth—anything you like. Perhaps a charming dream.
Well, the dream is over; that is the only thing I am certain about. All that remains of it is the memory of a good friend who, by a truly magical freak of fate, has found the one woman, in my opinion, suited to him.
Jeanne, I am not disguising the facts. This is the first and the last time, too, for that matter—that the subject of Malthe and myself is mentioned between us.
The whole time you and I were knocking about the world like homeless vagrants, you never referred to it, or let drop a hint, that you knew the whole humiliating connection. Though I knew that you knew, and that raised you in my esteem as a human creature to an extraordinary degree. I think so highly of Malthe that you alone seem to me good enough for him. So you see what you write about committing a “robbery” has no point. And more than that, I can tell you I am one of those women ill adapted to live with, much less to love, another human being. I am quite clear now about this. You, on the contrary, in compensation for your joyless youth, are endowed with the capacity for self-sacrifice and yielding. For you it will be a positive delight to abandon your ego, and let it be absorbed by his. For me such a thing is inconceivable.
There is no necessity to recur any more to the past—at least as far as I am concerned. On your behalf we unfortunately have to do it. Much more than the news itself, does your question, shall you speak or be silent, perplex my brain and excite my emotions.
If my position was now what it once was, and my views of life what they once were, I should answer decidedly: Keep your lips closed, and the secret that concerns only you, locked in your heart! But now there are other factors to consider. I am changed. Time and life—I scarcely know what—have changed me—and you are not like the majority of women, and Malthe is not a man like other men.
You may perhaps cause him a never-ending torment by speaking. Be clear on this, or you may cause yourself no less pain by keeping silent, and letting what is past and over for ever be forgotten. I know you, Jeanne; every day and every hour you will despise yourself more and more because his belief in you is so boundless.
You can’t be silent. You will be compelled to lie. What to ninety-nine people out of a hundred would be simple and natural enough will undermine not only your self-respect, but your joy in life. On the other hand, you have never loved. The thing you call your past, has really had no significance for you. Why should it be unearthed now, and dragged into the glare of day? Why should something that meant nothing but words to you, be made crucial? Are you two, you and he, to spend the most beautiful years of your love in exhuming corpses and taking them about with you wherever you go?
Joergen Malthe is not as other men are. He will never reproach you, but he will grieve, and you will grieve with him.