"The door of the House of Life is open for you and for me, but it is closed against her. It is in your power at least to set it ajar for her; to admit her, too, into full fellowship through striving and through love.
"She will help you with your vineyard people, and, perhaps, come to peace that way. Her unhappy face as I saw it last haunts me—I cannot help feeling that I am in some way responsible. She needs you and what you can give her, more, perhaps, than I, who shall never have it again.
"Never! The word, as I write it, tolls through my consciousness like a funeral knell. Never to see your face again, or to touch your hand, or to hear you say you love me. Never to feel your arms holding me close, your heart beating against mine, never to thrill with ecstasy in every fibre of me in answer to your kiss.
"Only the silence, broken, perhaps, by an occasional letter, and the call in the night, bridging the darkness and distance between us, to be answered for one little hour by love, surging from one to the other and back again.
Caught in a Web
"And yet these thoughts of ours are as a weaver's shuttle, plying endlessly through the web of night and space and time. One thought may make a slender thread, indeed, but what of the countless thoughts that fly back and forth, weaving and interweaving as they go? Shall they not make first a thread, and then a cord, then a web, and then a fabric, until, at last, there is no separation, but that of the body, which counts for naught?
"Dear Heart, you mean so much to me, are so much. From you and from your love for me I take fresh courage every day. From your strength I make sure of my own strength, from your tenderness I gather compassion, and from your steadfastness I gain the hope that leads me onward, the belief that enables me to face each day bravely and with a smile.
"Deep in my heart, I hold fast to one great joy. Sometimes I close the door quickly upon it and bar up the passage, lest anyone should guess that there, within a bare white chamber, is erected the high altar of my soul, where the lights shine far into the shadows, in spite of rock-hewn portals, closed and barred.
"The knowledge of your love I have with me always, to steady me, to guide me, to uplift me, to make even a grave warm and sweet. And to you, with my own hands, I have brought the divine fire that shall not fail, so what more need we ask of God, save that somewhere, sometime, in His infinite compassion, we may be together, even though it may be in the House not Made with Hands?
Edith to Alden