Letter LXV

My Dear: I dream of you now every night, and you are always kind, always
just as I knew you: the same without a shadow of change.

I cannot picture you anyhow else, though my life is full of the silence
you have made. My heart seems to have stopped on the last beat the sight
of your handwriting gave it.

I dare not bid you come back now: sorrow has made me a stranger to
myself. I could not look at you and say "I am your Star":--I could not
believe it if I said it. Two women have inhabited me, and the one here
now is not the one you knew and loved: their one likeness is that they
both have loved the same man, the one certain that her love was
returned, and the other certain of nothing. What a world of difference
lies in that!

I lay hands on myself, half doubting, and feel my skeleton pushing to
the front: my glass shows it me. Thus we are all built up: bones are at
the foundations of our happiness, and when the happiness wears thin,
they show through, the true architecture of humanity.

I have to realize now that I have become the greatest possible failure
in life,--a woman who has lost her "share of the world": I try to shape
myself to it.

It is deadly when a woman's sex, what was once her glory, reveals itself
to her as an all-containing loss. I realized myself fully only when I
was with you; and now I can't undo it.--You gone, I lean against a
shadow, and feel myself forever falling, drifting to no end, a Francesca
without a Paolo. Well, it must be some comfort that I do not drag you
with me. I never believed myself a "strong" woman; your lightest wish
shaped me to its liking. Now you have molded me with your own image and
superscription, and have cast me away.