For me has been destined the doing of that wrong I look upon as the deadliest of all. Treachery is the crime, and the crime is mine.
Let me tell you again, you tender woman, you dearest and noblest in the world, how I love you. I think of you constantly, I yearn for your sweet companionship. You are my dear ideal,—you are to me all peacefulness and worth and wisdom and womanly greatness and incomparable grace. You are the pure air to me.
Dear, it is because my love for you is the best that is in me that I am at such pains to make my confession absolute. My heart grows imperious at thought of you, and leaps for the highest course, though that bids for the supernal sacrifice of losing you—you, so sweetly gained! For you I should be happy to die now, heart in hand.
It would be sweet, I think, to die now, to leave this black dilemma, to vanish utterly. And yet, while you live, all splendor and all graces are here!
... Dear Anne, there is another woman I have been making love to—how I loathe to write the name—Doris Ewing, who loves me as I love you, and to whom I grew tender just in hopelessness of you.
So far away in the North you were, so like the figment of a fond impossible ideal, and she was here beside me, dark-eyed and sweet. I loved her. So often I said it—so sweetly she believed, and the habit grew. “I love you,” I said, even when I knew that love was just like. For often she was but as a small craft on the heaving sea of my passion, the sea that ran to its flood-tide for you!
I told her repeatedly I loved her—and lied. Was it any the less a lie that the spirit of romance was strong within me, and my heart-hunger made me mad? I loved her in this fashion, say, because she was loving, and my heart was full of love.
It did not come to me forcibly at the time that I was lying. I had come into the habit of her, and the words did not stick in my throat, as lies usually do. I did not despise myself. My duplicity I learned to contemplate with equanimity and to forget, and so I lied ardently and successfully. What a bad success it was!
For Doris loved me dearly, and cried over me a bit, now and then, I suspect, and was beautiful and happy. I wondered, sometimes (forgetting the reason that lay in my larger desire—you!), why I did not really love her.
Such is my story, as well as I understand it.