Now, as I look back, all these atoms of memory are dust and ashes that I have walked through in order to get to present things.  How I suffer, how I suffer!  If you could have dreamed that a human body could contain so much suffering, I think you would have chosen a less dreadful way of showing me your will:  you would have given me a reason why I have to suffer so.

Dearest, I am broken off every habit I ever had, except my love of you.  If you would come back to me you could shape me into whatever you wished.  I will be different in all but just that one thing.

LETTER LXXII.

Here in my pain, Beloved, I remember keenly now the one or two occasions when as a small child I was consciously a cause of pain to others.  What an irony of life that once of the two times when I remember to have been cruel, it was to Arthur, with his small astonished baby-face remaining a reproach to me ever after!  I was hardly five then, and going up to the nursery from downstairs had my supper-cake in my hand, only a few mouthfuls left.  He had been having his bath, and was sitting up on Nan-nan’s knee being got into his bed clothes; when spying me with my cake he piped to have a share of it.  I dare say it would not have been good for him, but of that I thought nothing at all:  the cruel impulse took me to make one mouthful of all that was left.  He watched it go without crying; but his eyes opened at me in a strange way, wondering at this sudden lesson of the hardness of a human heart.  “All gone!” was what he said, turning his head from me up to Nan-nan, to see perhaps if she too had a like surprise for his wee intelligence.  I think I have never forgiven myself that, though Arthur has no memory of it left in him:  the judging remembrance of it would, I believe, win forgiveness to him for any wrong he might now do me, if that and not the contrary were his way with me:  so unreasonably is my brain scarred where the thought of it still lies.  God may forgive us our trespasses by marvelous slow ways; but we cannot always forgive them ourselves.

The other thing came out of a less personal greed, and was years later:  Arthur and I were collecting eggs, and in the loft over one of the out-houses there was a swallow’s nest too high up to be reached by any ladder we could get up there.  I was intent on getting the eggs, and thought of no other thing that might chance:  so I spread a soft fall below, and with a long pole I broke the floor of the nest.  Then with a sudden stir of horror I saw soft things falling along with the clay, tiny and feathery.  Two were killed by the breakage that fell with them, but one was quite alive and unhurt.  I gathered up the remnants of the nest and set it with the young one in it by the loft window where the parent-birds might see, making clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my conscience.  The parent-birds did see, soon enough:  they returned, first up to the rafters, then darting round and round and crying; then to where their little one lay helpless and exposed, hung over it with a nibbling movement of their beaks for a moment, making my miserable heart bound up with hope:  then away, away, shrieking into the July sunshine.  Once they came back, and shrieked at the horror of it all, and fled away not to return.