y--and that
alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many
matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more
protective passion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you--and
mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I
could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours,
and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash,
until we should hate each other.

And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for
awhile as if I'd lost something. I have felt that way these weeks
that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me. I have felt it more
keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don't know where you may
have gone, nor if you will ever come back. I find myself
wondering how you will fare in this grim country. You're such a
visionary. You're so impractical. And neither nature nor society
is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable.

Do you understand what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if
you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I
started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am
oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from
its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous
journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have
regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and
my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity.
I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow
very strong if I let myself go.

I can see you scowl. You will say to yourself--looking at it from
your own peculiar angle--you will say: "She is not worth thinking
about." And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it
very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you
say it. Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you,
just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living
with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought
and act that I could not endure, still--knowing all this--I feel
a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel
a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you--and that is
often.

I shall change, of course. So will you. Psychologically, love
doesn't endure to death--unless it is nurture