to fight--when it's his eyes only, I'm
a coward at once; I feel I would do anything, anything, only not to hurt
him. Why can't he see? Is it because he's old and we are young? He may
consent, but he will never, never see; it will always hurt him.

"I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than these
--sometimes I have thought that I should never have the courage to face
the struggle which you have to face. Then I feel quite broken; it is
like something giving way in me. Then I think of you, and it is over;
but it has been there, and I am ashamed--I told you I was a coward. It's
like the feeling one would have going out into a storm on a dark night,
away from a warm fire--only of the spirit not the body--which makes it
worse. I had to tell you this; you mustn't think of it again, I mean to
fight it away and forget that it has ever been there. But Uncle
Nic--what am I to do? I hate myself because I am young, and he is old
and weak--sometimes I seem even to hate him. I have all sorts of
thoughts, and always at the end of them, like a dark hole at the end of a
passage, the thought that I ought to give you up. Ought I? Tell me. I
want to know, I want to do what is right; I still want to do that, though
sometimes I think I am all made of evil.

"Do you remember once when we were talking, you said: 'Nature always has
an answer for every question; you cannot get an answer from laws,
conventions, theories, words, only from Nature.' What do you say to me
now; do you tell me it is Nature to come to you in spite of everything,
and so, that it must be right? I think you would; but can it be Nature
to do something which will hurt terribly one whom I love and who loves
me? If it is--Nature is cruel. Is that one of the 'lessons of life'?
Is that what Aunt Constance means when she says: 'If life were not a
paradox, we could not get on at all'? I am beginning to see that
everything has its dark side; I never believed that before.

"Uncle Nic dreads the life for me; he doesn't understand (how should
he?--he has always had money) how life can be tolerable without money--it
is horrible that the accident of money should make such difference in our
lives. I am sometimes afraid myself, and I can't outface that fear in
him; he sees the shadow of his fear in me--his eyes seem to see
everything that is in me now; the eyes of old people are the saddest
things in the world. I am writing like a wretched coward, but