When I asked you about the places of your youth, I had some fear of finding that we might once have met, and that I had not remembered it as the summing up of my happiness in being young. Far off I see something undiscovered waiting us, something I could not have guessed at before—the happiness of being old. Will it not be something like the evening before last when we were sitting together, your hand in mine, and one by one, as the twilight drew about us, the stars came and took up their stations overhead? They seemed to me then to be following out some quiet train of thought in the universal mind: the heavens were remembering the stars back into their places:—the Ancient of Days drawing upon the infinite treasures of memory in his great lifetime. Will not Love's old age be the same to us both—a starry place of memories?
Your dear letter is with me while I write: how shortly you are able to say everything! To-morrow you will come. What more do I want—except to-morrow itself, with more promises of the same thing?
You are at my heart, dearest: nothing in the world can be nearer to me than you!
LETTER III.
Dearest and rightly Beloved: You cannot tell how your gift has pleased me; or rather you can, for it shows you have a long memory back to our first meeting: though at the time I was the one who thought most of it.
It is quite true; you have the most beautifully shaped memory in Christendom: these are the very books in the very edition I have long wanted, and have been too humble to afford myself. And now I cannot stop to read one, for joy of looking at them all in a row. I will kiss you for them all, and for more besides: indeed it is the "besides" which brings you my kisses at all.
Now that you have chosen so perfectly to my mind, I may proffer a request which, before, I was shy of making. It seems now beneficently anticipated. It is that you will not ever let your gifts take the form of jewelry, not after the ring which you are bringing me: that, you know, I both welcome and wish for. But, as to the rest, the world has supplied me with a feeling against jewelry as a love-symbol. Look abroad and you will see: it is too possessive, too much like "chains of office"—the fair one is to wear her radiant harness before the world, that other women may be envious and the desire of her master's eye be satisfied! Ah, no!
I am yours, dear, utterly; and nothing you give me would have that sense: I know you too well to think it. But in the face of the present fashion (and to flout it), which expects the lover to give in this sort, and the beloved to show herself a dazzling captive, let me cherish my ritual of opposition which would have no meaning if we were in a world of our own, and no place in my thoughts, dearest;—as it has not now, so far as you are concerned. But I am conscious I shall be looked at as your chosen; and I would choose my own way of how to look back most proudly.