"Of course it is idealized—yet so absurdly like that they tell me all Mayfair is staring! This talk—this stirring-up of what has been sleeping—will make it a thousand times harder for us ever to see each other, yet I am glad you did it!
"They are saying—Mayfair—that your 'making a pageant of a bleeding heart' is as indelicate as Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon! If people are going to be in love wickedly at least they ought not to write books about it—nor paint pictures of it!... Oh, beloved, let us pray that we may always keep bitterness out of our portraits of each other!"
The letter burned my fingers, for the pen marks were quick and jagged—like electric sparks—and I felt the pain that had sent them out; so I turned back to others of the batch—others that I knew almost by heart, yet always found something new in.
"I don't know that it's such an enviable state, after all, this being in love," I mused. "It seems to me it consists of—quite a mixture! But, of course, it will take Heaven itself to solve the problem of a thornless rose!"
I ran my finger over the edges of the improvised envelopes, heavily sealed and bearing complicated foreign stamping. There were dozens of them—many only the common garden variety of love-letters, long-drawn out, confidential, reminiscent or hopeful, as the case might be—and a few which sounded at times almost light-hearted.
"When I say that I think of you all the time I am not so original as my critics give me credit for being, dear heart," she wrote in one. "Nothing else in the annals of love-making is so trite as this, but when I explain how persistently your image is before me, how intricately woven with every thought of the future—how inseparably linked with every vision of happiness—you will know that mine is no light nor passing attachment.
"If I give you one foolish example of this will it bore you? I've written you before, I believe, that this spring I have been outdoors all the time—riding or driving about the country, because the mad restlessness of thinking about you drives me out. In this house, in these gardens, you are so constantly present that I can do nothing but remember—then I go away, hoping to forget—and what happens?—I go into a castle—a place where you have never been, perhaps—and before I can begin talking with any one, or think of any sensible thing to say the thought comes to me: 'How well the figure of my lover would fit in with all this grandeur! How naturally and easily he would swing through these great rooms!'
"Then, early some mornings I ride into the village—past cottages that look so humble and happy that I feel my heart stifling with longing to possess one of them—and you! 'How happy I could be living there,' I think, 'but—how tremendously tall and stalwart Jim would look coming in through this low doorway, as I called him to supper!'
"Then I spend hours and hours planning the real home I want us to have, dear love of mine. I don't care much whether it is a castle or a cottage, just so it has you in it—and all around it must be the sight of distant hills! These for your artist's soul!
"You and a hundred distant hills, Jim! Then days—and nights, and nights and days—and summers and winters of joy!