Letter LXVI

Dearest: Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need--for
the sake of you. I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day
as I received them. Only one a day, so that I have still something left to
look forward to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what unanswerable things
they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily!
There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a
drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it
now feels and waits.

All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty now: only seems, dearest,
for I still say, I do say that it is not so. I know it is not so: I,
who know nothing else, know that! So I look every day at one of these
monstrous contradictions, and press it to my heart till it becomes
reconciled with the pain that is there always.

Indeed you loved me: that I see now. Words which I took so much for
granted then have a strange force now that I look back at them. You did
love: and I who did not realize it enough then, realize it now when you
no longer do.

And the commentary on all this is that one letter of yours which I say
over and over to myself sometimes when I cannot pray: "There is no fault
in you: the fault is elsewhere; I can no longer love you as I did. All
that was between us must be at an end; for your good and mine the only
right thing is to say good-by without meeting. I know you will not
forget me, but you will forgive me, even because of the great pain I
cause you. You are the most generous woman I have known. If it would
comfort you to blame me for this I would beg you to do it: but I know
you better, and ask you to believe that it is my deep misfortune rather
than my fault that I can be no longer your lover, as, God knows, I was
once, I dare not say how short a time ago. To me you remain, what I
always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray
to meet."