--------------------

The Second Part

which shows how the editor visits Jessica
in the country, and how love
and philosophy sometimes clash.

XVII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

WRITTEN AFTER RETURNING FROM MORNINGTOWN

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

It is all different and the morning has forgotten to return since I left
you where your village meets the great world. Have you kept God's common
dayspring imprisoned among your garden trees and flowers? What shall I
say? What shall I not say? Only this, that I gave my happiness into your
hands and you have broken it and let it drop to the ground. See what a
shipwreck I have suffered of all my dreams. These long years of solitary
reading and study I have been gathering up in my imagination the passions
and joys and hopes of a thousand dead lovers,--the longing of Menelaus for
Helen, the outcry of Catullus for Lesbia, the worship of Dante for
Beatrice--all these I have made my own, believing that some day my love of
a woman should be rendered fair in her eyes by these borrowed colours; and
now I have failed and lost; and what I would give, you have accounted as
light and insufficient. Is there no speech left to tell you all the truth?
I am a little bewildered, and have not been able to pluck up heart of
courage. Write me some word of familiar consolation; do not quite shut the
door upon me until my eyes grow accustomed to this darkness. All the light
is with you, and the beauty that God has given the world, all the meaning
of human life,--and I turn my back on this and go out into the night
alone. Dear girl, I would not utter a word of reproach. I know that my
love, which seemed to me so good, may be as nothing to you, is indeed not
worthy of you, for you are more than all my dreams--and yet it was all
that I had. I shall learn perhaps to write to you as a mere reviewer of
books;--the irony of it.

XVIII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

Can you believe it? I was absurdly glad to receive your letter this
morning. Ever since you went away I have felt so brave and desolate--like
a poor dryad who has fought her way out of her own little kingdom of love
and peace and green silence, for the sake of a foreign ideal which really
belongs to the world at large. (I shouldn't wonder if I did become a
deaconess after all!) In my effort to escape a romantic sacrifice to a
strange heathen divinity, I find myself offered upon this common altar in
the name of a theory, Hu