I have felt that we were very near to each other lately.
You have shown me the tenderness of your heart, and
I love you quite rapturously. I love your goodness,
your sympathy—perhaps when I see you I
can tell you!
DEAREST THYRSIS:
I received a postal just now, saying that you were
coming soon. I had my usual queer faintness.
It was like receiving word from the dead—it
seemed such centuries—aeons—since
I heard from you! I send you this batch of notes
I have written you at various times, a sort of mental
itinerary, for my mind has traveled into all sorts
of queer places, back and forth. I tell you that
without your continual influence, I am lost in doubt
and uncertainty. Please try to understand these
notes and my fits of love and fear.
DEAR THYRSIS:
I am in one of my cast-iron moods, this morning—in
a fighting mood, I do not care with whom or what.
You, even you, have not altogether understood me—you
have often given me a dog’s portion. I
have been a slave, a cowering kitten before you, and
you (unwittingly I know) have done much to destroy
all my courage and hope and love—by what
you call making me aware of your higher self.
Fortunately I know what your higher self is,
quite as well as you do, if not a little better—and
I know that it is the self that most strengthens my
love and courage, the self that most fills me with
life. I have a right to life as well as you, and
a right to the love in you that most inspires me.
I feel I am capable of judging this, in spite of all
my lack of education, and my inability to follow you
in your intellectual life.
I have thought lately that you were able to make yourself
believe that you were anything you wished to think
yourself. Whenever you wring my heart and deprive
me of strength, I shall go somewhere alone, and when
I have controlled myself, come back to you.
You say you are master—but it must be master
of the right. I want strength, and why you should
think it right ever to have helped to throw me into
more despair, I do not know. The reason I have
written all this is because such ideas have come to
me lately, and a fear that sometimes you might resort
to your unloving methods, with the thought of its
being right. I tell you I would rather stay at
home, than ever go through with some of the pangs
you have cost me, in what you called your higher moods.
You must not gainsay me, that I am also capable of
respecting high moods and bowing before them; but
it would seem to me that they are only high if they
are a source of inspiration and joy to me.
Because we love each other, would that be any reason
why we must dote upon each other, or sink from our
high resolves? I cannot see why our love for
each other should not always be a means of our reaching
our higher selves. You need not answer this letter—but
when you come back, tell me whether what I say impresses
you as being right or wrong—if there is
not some justification in it. But perhaps I should
wait. I have no right to disturb you now.
