“Katrine,
“Very well. Very well indeed. I understand, and I agree. My birthday is next month, so it fits in all right. Rather a special birthday this time, for I shall be twenty-five. Last year I was thirty-five. These things happen sometimes; I’ve heard of them. When it comes to one’s own turn, it’s jolly good work. You’ll just have time to catch that birthday, if you write off at once. Awfully good of you to worry about my sufferings in being obliged to reply to your—problematically—boring letters! I’ll risk it, Katrine! I’ll do more than that, I’ll promise to own up, and tell you straight, not only when I reach the bored stage, but long before it is even approximately approached. If there is no other advantage in this thundering distance, there is at least this, that we can be honest to the verge of brutality, and there’s no earthly sense in a correspondence—(beg pardon!—occasional exchange of letters)—if it is not for our mutual pleasure and profit. Wherefore, Miss Sensitive Conscience, kindly understand that so long as I don’t say I am bored I am to be the superlative, the other thing!
“As to your first question, you are not only justified, but it’s your bounden duty to open your life to every fresh interest which comes along. There’s no greater mistake than to believe that any work can be done the better for deliberately closing the shutters on all other claims. You have a duty to yourself, as well as to that precious Martin, and it is even conceivable that he might fare the better for a little less attention!
“So far as I have gathered facts from Dorothea, Martin lost his wife eight years ago. She was his wife for six short months, and she has been dead eight years. He was a boy at that time; since then he has grown into a man, and a reputation. The Martin who came to you in his grief, and to whom you mortgaged your life, is dead too; as dead as the poor little wife! So long as he was alive, you were a big help to him. He was miserable enough no doubt, poor beggar, but the last extremity of despair was spared him by your love and care. I’d swear to that! But that Martin died, and with him your power.
“Thus far, and no farther! There’s a wall, Katrine, between the soul of every brother and sister who was ever created, and sooner or later they come up against it. All the love, and the care, and the patience, and the trying and crying can never scale it. And then one day comes along a vagrant who doesn’t cry, doesn’t try, perhaps doesn’t even care, and before that stranger is an open road. Which is a mystery, dear, and a commonplace. Likewise cussedly unfair.
“Do you mind if I call you ‘dear’? It’s only on paper, and it’s so long since I’ve had any one to endear. It takes off a bit of the loneliness to feel that there is some one in the world to whom one can occasionally show a glimpse of one’s heart. It’s the only bit of me that has a chance of feeling cold out here—but it’s petrifying fast enough. If you object, if it shocks your sense of decorum, well!—I’ll write it all the same, but I’ll blot it out afterwards. You needn’t know anything about it. Pens will blot on this thin paper!
“Don’t worry yourself because you are not the world and all to Martin. He would be an odd fellow if you were. It’s not in nature that a sister should satisfy a man’s heart, and it’s no use bucking against nature. Neither need you worry because of his discontent. If you’d ever suffered from a big wound, you’d understand that at the first, one is numbed by the shock; it’s only when the knitting up and rebuilding begin that the pain bites deep. Look upon his restlessness and depression as growing pains, and the beginning of his cure. Poor little Katrine! but this sort of thing is confoundedly hard on the looker-on.
“You want to know about myself—and why your eyes look sorry as they watch me turn out on my lone. Well, you know, Katrine—I am—I was, thirty-five last birthday; only child, parents gone, relations scattered, strangers to me in all but name. Outside the regiment there is not a soul to count in my life, and at the end of four years, unless the impossible happens, I must leave the regiment and say good-bye to my friends. They offered me a majority in the Blankshire a year ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to face the wrench, but as anything is preferable to idleness and the shelf, I shall have to start life again among strangers before I’m forty, with two or three captain fellows swearing vengeance at me for being promoted over their heads! It’s not exactly a glowing vista, and the prospect of that forty makes a man think. When he sits alone on a sweltering Indian night, and compares his lot with that of fellows like Middleton, for instance, it is depressing work!
“In one or other department of life a man must have success, if he is to know content. Work counts for a lot, but it must be successful work to make up a whole. A big career appeals to all men—the sense of power, the consciousness that one particular bit of the world’s work depends upon him, and would suffer from his absence, but that sort of success hasn’t come my way. It’s the jolliest regiment in the world, the best set of fellows, but it’s been our luck to be ‘out of things,’ and we are hopelessly blocked.
“Then there’s the home department! Middleton (I use him as a type) can never ask himself ‘what is the good,’ while he has his wife and that stunning little lad. He has his depressed moods like the rest, but when they come on, Dorothea makes love to him, and the little chap sits on his knee. At such times any nice feeling young photograph ought to sympathise with a lonely fellow who sits by and—looks on!