dge her to write to me, and when she did it was a brief,
enigmatical, friendly letter with not a word of the reality between us.

I wrote back a love letter--my first love letter--and she made no reply
for eight days. Then came a scrawl: "I can't write letters. Wait till we
can talk. Are you better?"

I think the reader would be amused if he could see the papers on my desk
as I write all this, the mangled and disfigured pages, the experimental
arrangements of notes, the sheets of suggestions balanced in
constellations, the blottesque intellectual battlegrounds over which
I have been fighting. I find this account of my relations to Beatrice
quite the most difficult part of my story to write. I happen to be a
very objective-minded person, I forget my moods, and this was so much an
affair of moods. And even such moods and emotions as I recall are very
difficult to convey. To me it is about as difficult as describing a
taste or a scent.

Then the objective story is made up of little things that are difficult
to set in a proper order. And love in an hysterical passion, now high,
now low, now exalted, and now intensely physical. No one has ever yet
dared to tell a love story completely, its alternations, its comings and
goings, its debased moments, its hate. The love stories we tell, tell
only the net consequence, the ruling effect....

How can I rescue from the past now the mystical quality of Beatrice; my
intense longing for her; the overwhelming, irrational, formless desire?
How can I explain how intimately that worship mingled with a high,
impatient resolve to make her mine, to take her by strength and courage,
to do my loving in a violent heroic manner? And then the doubts, the
puzzled arrest at the fact of her fluctuations, at her refusal to marry
me, at the fact that even when at last she returned to Bedley Corner she
seemed to evade me?

That exasperated me and perplexed me beyond measure.

I felt that it was treachery. I thought of every conceivable
explanation, and the most exalted and romantic confidence in her did not
simply alternate, but mingled with the basest misgivings.

And into the tangle of memories comes the figure of Carnaby, coming
out slowly from the background to a position of significance, as an
influence, as a predominant strand in the nets that kept us apart, as a
rival. What were the forces that pulled her away from me when it was
so clearly manifest she loved me? Did she think of marrying