st.

LETTER LXV.

My Dear: I dream of you now every night, and you are always kind, always
just as I knew you: the same without a shadow of change.

I cannot picture you anyhow else, though my life is full of the silence
you have made. My heart seems to have stopped on the last beat the sight
of your handwriting gave it.

I dare not bid you come back now: sorrow has made me a stranger to
myself. I could not look at you and say "I am your Star":--I could not
believe it if I said it. Two women have inhabited me, and the one here
now is not the one you knew and loved: their one likeness is that they
both have loved the same man, the one certain that her love was
returned, and the other certain of nothing. What a world of difference
lies in that!

I lay hands on myself, half doubting, and feel my skeleton pushing to
the front: my glass shows it me. Thus we are all built up: bones are at
the foundations of our happiness, and when the happiness wears thin,
they show through, the true architecture of humanity.

I have to realize now that I have become the greatest possible failure
in life,--a woman who has lost her "share of the world": I try to shape
myself to it.

It is deadly when a woman's sex, what was once her glory, reveals itself
to her as an all-containing loss. I realized myself fully only when I
was with you; and now I can't undo it.--You gone, I lean against a
shadow, and feel myself forever falling, drifting to no end, a Francesca
without a Paolo. Well, it must be some comfort that I do not drag you
with me. I never believed myself a "strong" woman; your lightest wish
shaped me to its liking. Now you have molded me with your own image and
superscription, and have cast me away.

Are not the die and the coin that comes from it only two sides of the
same form?--there is not a hair's breadth anywhere between their
surfaces where they lie, the one inclosing the other. Yet part them, and
the light strikes on them how differently! That is a mere condition of
light: join them in darkness, where the light cannot strike, and they
are the same--two faces of a single form. So you and I, dear, when we
are dead, shall come together again, I trust. Or are we to come back to
each other defaced and warped out of our true conjunction? I think not:
for if you have changed, if soul can ever change, I shall be melted
again by your touch, and flow to meet all the change that is in you,
since my true self is to be you.