"Oh, my big boy Anthony! Shall I ever forget you, with your brown lock over your blue eyes, your unswerving honesty of purpose, your high ideals. When you came home from college, and I had just put up my hair, and lengthened my dresses, you started to kiss me, then stopped. 'I thought I could,' you said, with such a funny note of surprise in your voice, 'but there's something about you that sort of—holds me off, Di.'
"I think then that I began to know my power over you. And how I have used it, Anthony! I have kept you single and alone all these years, because something in me would not yield to your kind of wooing.
"If only you could have been a cave man and could have carried me off! So many women wish that of men, especially proud women. It isn't that we admire brutality, but we want to have all of our little feminine doubts and fears overcome by the man's decisive action. And you made the mistake of waiting patiently, asking me now and then, 'Will you?' instead of saying, 'You must.'
"Yet while you could not win me, in other ways you dominated me. Do you remember the holidays when I came home from boarding-school, and you were interne at a hospital? You asked me to go to the theater with you, and at the last moment you were called to the operating room to help one of the surgeons. You telephoned that you'd send a carriage for me and my chaperon, but that you couldn't go;—and I wouldn't go either, but stayed at home and sulked, and looked at myself in the glass, now and then, to mourn over the fact that you couldn't see me in my pink organdie with the rosebuds.
"But you wouldn't even apologize for what I called your neglect. I said I should never go with you. You said it wasn't neglect, and that I should go. And go I did, finally, as meekly as possible, and I wore the pink organdie and had a lovely time.
"It's the memory of that night when you couldn't fit your plans to mine which has made me write this letter. When I came home from Harbor Light I found Bettina waiting up for me, and she broke down as the depressing realities of your work were forced upon her. I was very toploftical, Anthony—and was prepared to read her a sermon on the duties of a doctor's wife, when all at once I had a vision of myself in that rosebud organdie. I hated your work then, and I felt that you lacked something of devotion to me, to let it keep you from me.
"But later I felt differently. The world began to call you a great man—and I began to see with clearer eyes what you were doing for the world. And so I helped you at Harbor Light, and saw you there at your best—with your forceful control of all those helpless people, with your steadiness of hand and eye, a king who ruled by virtue of his power over life and death.
"It was in those days, I think, that I began to worship you. But I never called my worship love. I wanted to be Me, Myself, and somehow I felt that when I was once promised to you I should have no separate identity. It was the rebellion of a strong personality against a stronger one. I was not wise enough to see that you who protected others from the storms of life might want some little haven of your own—a haven which would be—Home.
"But because you failed to be masterful in the one way which would have won me, because you said, always, 'Will you?' instead of, 'Come—let there be no more of this between you and me, Diana,' I went away, not understanding you, not understanding myself.
"And over there with Sophie, I met Van Rosen. As I look back upon it, I do not wonder that he charmed me. He was different from our American men, a lover of pleasure. He typified the spirit of joy to me—there was never a moment when he had not some vivid plan for me. We did things of which I had always dreamed.