d not to misjudge you--not to say and think impatiently about you
things which would explain why I had to die like this.

Dearest, nothing but love shall explain anything of you to me. When I
think of your dear face, it is only love that can give it its meaning.
If love would teach me the meaning of this silence, I would accept all
the rest, and not ask for any joy in life besides. For if I had the
meaning, however dark, it would be by love speaking to me again at last;
and I should have your hand holding mine in the darkness forever.

Your face, Beloved, I can remember so well that it would be enough if I
had your hand:--the meaning, just the meaning, why I have to sit blind.

LETTER LXXV.

Dearest: There is always one possibility which I try to remember in all I
write: even where there is no hope a thing remains _possible_:--that your
eye may some day come to rest upon what I leave here. And I would have
nothing so dark as to make it seem that I were better dead than to have
come to such a pass through loving you. If I felt that, dearest, I should
not be writing my heart out to you, as I do: when I cease doing that I
shall indeed have become dead and not want you any more, I suppose. How
far I am from dying, then, now!

So be quite sure that if now, even now,--for to-day of all days has
seemed most dark--if now I were given my choice--to have known you or
not to have known you,--Beloved, a thousand times I would claim to keep
what I have, rather than have it taken away from me. I cannot forget
that for a few months I was the happiest woman I ever knew: and that
happiness is perhaps only by present conditions removed from me. If I
have a soul, I believe good will come back to it: because I have done
nothing to deserve this darkness unless by loving you: and if _by_
loving you, I am glad that the darkness came.

Beloved, you have the yes and no to all this: _I_ have not, and cannot
have. Something that you have not chosen for me to know, you know: it
should be a burden on your conscience, surely, not to have shared it
with me. Maybe there is something I know that you do not. In the way of
sorrow, I think and wish--yes. In the way of love, I wish to think--no.

Any more thinking wearies me. Perhaps we have loved too much, and have
lost our way out of our poor five senses, without having strength to
take over the new world which is waiting beyond them. Well, I would
rather, Beloved, suffer through loving too