e; to feel
there was an independent me still capable of asserting itself. My belief
is that, waking, you hold me subjugated: but, once your godhead has put
on its spiritual nightcap, and begun nodding, your mesmeric influence
relaxes. Up starts resolution and independence, and I breathe desolately
for a time, feeling myself once more a free woman.

'Twas a tremulous experience, Beloved; but I loved it all the more for
that. How we love playing at grief and death--the two things that must
come--before it is their due time! I took a look at my world for three
most mortal hours last night, trying to see you _out_ of it. And oh, how
close it kept bringing me! I almost heard you breathe, and was forever
wondering--Can we ever be nearer, or love each other more than we do?
For _that_ we should each want a sixth sense, and a second soul: and it
would still be only the same spread out over larger territory. I prefer
to keep it nesting close in its present limitations, where it feels like
a "growing pain"; children have it in their legs, we in our hearts.

I am growing sleepy as I write, and feel I am sending you a dull
letter,--my penalty for doing as you forbade.

I sat up from half-past one to a quarter to five to see our shadow go
over heaven. I didn't see much, the sky was too piebald: but I was not
disappointed, as I had never watched the darkness into dawn like that
before: and it was interesting to hear all the persons awaking:--cocks
at half-past four, frogs immediately after, then pheasants and various
others following. I was cuddled close up against my window, throned in a
big arm-chair with many pillows, a spirit-lamp, cocoa, bread and butter,
and buns; so I fared well. Just after the pheasants and the first
querulous fidgetings of hungry blackbirds comes a soft pattering along
the path below: and Benjy, secretive and important, is fussing his way
to the shrubbery, when instinct or real sentiment prompts him to look up
at my window; he gives a whimper and a wag, and goes on. I try to
persuade myself that he didn't see me, and that he does this, other
mornings, when I am not thus perversely bolstered up in rebellion, and
peering through blinds at wrong hours. Isn't there something pathetic in
the very idea that a dog may have a behind-your-back attachment of that
sort?--that every morning he looks up at an unresponsive blank, and
wags, and goes by?

I heard him very happy in the shrubs a moment after: he and a phea