Ever since I saw you last I have been close to happiness in spite of my distress. You love me. I tell myself that over and over. I cling to it and rest in it. For this is the greatest thing that ever came into my life.
I wish, dear, dear friend, that I could show you my heart. I wish you could understand how great is the temptation to throw away discretion and accept this wonderful gift. A thousand times I have been over the ground, trying to persuade myself that you are right and my caution a coward’s fear with no basis in reason. But I can’t. I can’t. Before I dared to take your life into my keeping, I would have to be sure. And how can I be? How can I know that this horrible thing won’t rise up some day and throttle your happiness?
Why did I not meet you before I had given hostages to this destructive menace? I keep asking myself why. I can find no answer that is not born in bitter mockery.
If you could know what you have done for me, how you have rebuilt my faith in good, in God! No man ever had so wonderful a friend.
That was all, except the signature at the bottom. But it made her heart sing. Her doubts were at rest. He loved her. That was all she wanted to know. The difficulties in his mind would vanish. Her love would beat them down. What scruples, what fears could stand against this joy that flooded them both?
She longed to tell him so, to pour her heart out in what was to be the first love-letter she had ever written. Yet she was not impatient of the delays forced on her by ranch details, by Ruth’s imperious demands for attention. She could attend to these competently and without irritation because subconsciously her being floated in happiness. Life had always given Betty what she wanted. It was unthinkable that there should be withheld from her that which was the crown of all her hopes.
Alone at the desk in the living-room, after everybody else on the ranch had retired, Betty gave herself up to the luxury of dreams. She felt very wide awake. It would not be possible to sleep until she had written an answer. There was no hurry about it. She wanted to take plenty of time to think out what she wanted to say before she even started on it.
When she began to write, her thoughts flew fast. They kept busy the flashing finger-tips that transmitted the messages to the white page on the carriage of the typewriter. The sentences were short, impulsive, energetic. They expressed the surge of eagerness in her.
She knew she would copy it in long hand, would go over every word of every sentence. The other side of her, the shy-eyed maiden of dreams who must be the wooed and not the wooer, would insist on deleting, trimming down, making colorless the swift and passionate staccato of the words. The letter she would send to Hollister would be pale and neutral compared to this cry of the heart she was uttering.
The little glass-cased clock on her desk struck two. Betty was surprised. She had been here alone with her thoughts for four hours. The fire in the grate had died down and the room was beginning to chill. She gathered the live coals and put upon them two split lengths of resinous pine.