“Good news, Roger?”
“The best, and the worst!”
“Oh! Tell me about it, when I come.”
...Do your eyebrows slope, and your lips upcurl?
I have written it all out. When she comes (she is coming soon) I shall tell her all, as I have told you. This is to be the blackest hour of my life. I have made up my mind to tell her the truth. It is her right. But my heart has so often failed me. If this is tenderness, why what a false tenderness it is!
I have no more hopes of you now than I had when I wrote you. But I belong to you, and will always belong to you, just for your once loving, even though you despise me, now and forever.
I shall tell her frankly, extenuating nothing. For I will have no more lies. On that I am resolved.
Anne, I do not truly live without you, and I crave the intensest living. I think of you always as I saw you first—tall and fair, with the gold across your temples, and the museful, wistful mouth with its serious thinking silences and then its soft rapid speech, and the eyes, the blue eyes, that had for me such exquisite language. You are repose—Heaven! And I am in a hell of my own making, and, dearest, I could not help it! Ah, I am pleading! I did not mean to plead.
Did you have a dream of me, as noble, say? Here am I, who love life because of you, who love you more than that life or my hope of heaven. But what to you is such a love?
She is coming soon, and I shall tell her. I say I shall have no more deception. I am yours—yours! I dare not write the prayer that is in my heart. I cannot say farewell. Remember, when you despise me worst, I am yours!