Letter XVII

Dearest: Do I not write you long letters? It reveals my weakness. I have
thought (it had been coming on me, and now and then had broken out of me
before I met you) that, left to myself, I should have become a writer of
books--I scarcely can guess what sort--and gone contentedly into
middle-age with that instead of this as my raison d'être.

How gladly I lay down that part of myself, and say--"But for you, I had
been this quite other person, whom I have no wish to be now"! Beloved,
your heart is the shelf where I put all my uncut volumes, wondering a
little what sort of a writer I should have made; and chiefly wondering,
would you have liked me in that character?

There is one here in the family who considers me a writer of the darkest
dye, and does not approve of it. Benjy comes and sits most mournfully
facing me when I settle down on a sunny morning, such as this, to write:
and inquires, with all the dumbness a dog is capable of--"What has come
between us, that you fill up your time and mine with those cat's-claw
scratchings, when you should be in your woodland dress running [with] me
through damp places?"

Having written this sentimental meaning into his eyes, and Benjy still
sitting watching me, I was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and
took him to see his mother's grave. At the bottom of the long walk is our
dog's cemetery:--no tombstones, but mounds; and a dog-rose grows there and
flourishes as nowhere else. It was my fancy as a child to have it planted:
and I declare to you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if it
knew that it had relations of a higher species under its keeping. Benjy,
too, has a profound air of knowing, and never scratches for bones there,
as he does in other places. What horror, were I to find him digging up his
mother's skeleton! Would my esteem for him survive?