Your words, as I read them again, dear heart, are
full of a great beauty and fire and energy, and I
only hope you may keep them always. I believe
that the possibility of the marriage we both desire,
depends greatly if not entirely on your sternness.
You must realize it.
I cannot tell with the proper conditions and training
what energy I might be able to accumulate for myself,
but in the meanwhile the thing that makes me most
wretched is my utter incapacity at times, and my inability
to share with you your work. In my weaker and
more helpless moods, I ask myself with a pang, whether
I ought to go with you at all, when I cannot help
you. But I must stop fuming. I have come
out of my mudpuddle for good and for all, and that
is the main consideration. I don’t intend
to go back.
We must not think of each other in any way but as
co-workers in a great labor; we must simply know that
our love is rooted deeply, and the harder we work
the more firm it will be. There is no reason why
we should not go to the altar with just this sternness,
and from now on preserve this attitude until the day
when we have earned the right to consider what love
means. Can you do it? I will prove to you
that I can.
MY DEAR THYRSIS:
I am trying very dreadfully, and go away alone and
pound at the German as if my life depended upon it.
I go to bed every night with a tight feeling in my
head, but I do not mind, as I take it for a guarantee
that I have not rested.
And oh, my dearest, dearest and best, I am trying
not to think of you too much—that is too
much in a way that does not help me to study.
But I love you really, yes, truly, and I know I would
follow you anywhere. I am not particularly joyful,
but then I do not expect to be for a great many years.
DEAR THYRSIS:
Only a few words. I have been hovering to-day
between spurts of hopeful energy, and the most indescribable
despair. It positively freezes my heart, and
I have been on the point of writing to you and telling
you to relieve yourself of the responsibility of me.
The reason is because it seems a perfectly Herculean
task to read “Egmont”. I have to
look up words in the dictionary until I am absolutely
so weary I care not about anything; and then I think
of you, and what you are able to do, and at one word
from you I would give up all idea of marrying you.
I tell you I am up and down in this mood. Great
God, I could work all day and all night if I could
do what you do, but to strain at iron fetters—a
snail! Oh, I cannot tell you—I simply
groan under it. At such times I have no more
idea of marrying you than of journeying to the moon.
I repeat to you, to be constantly choked back, while
you are rapidly advancing, will kill me. I don’t
know what you will say to this, but it is intolerable,
unendurable, to me. When I think of your ability
and mine, I simply laugh about it —Thyrsis,
it is simply ridiculous. I do not ask you to take
me with you, Thyrsis.
