A Duet (with an occasional chorus) | Page 6

enumerated? But these things are all the merest
trimmings of life. They are not the essentials. YOU and your love are
the essentials. Some one who will love me with all his heart. Some one
whom I can love with all my heart. Oh the difference it makes in life!
How it changes everything! It glorifies and beautifies everything. I
always felt that I was capable of a great love--and now I have it.
Fancy your imagining that you had come into my life in order to darken
it. Why, you ARE my life. If you went out of it, what would be left?
You talk about my happiness before I met you--but oh, how empty it all
was! I read, and played, and sang as you say, but what a void there was!
I did it to please mother, but there really seemed no very clear reason
why I should continue to do it. Then you came, and everything was
changed. I read because you are fond of reading and because I wanted
to talk about books with you. I played because you are fond of music. I
sang in the hope that it might please you. Whatever I did, you were
always in my mind. I tried and tried to become a better and nobler
woman, because I wanted to be worthy of the love you bore me. I have
changed, and developed, and improved more in the last three months
than in all my life before. And then you come and tell me that you have
darkened my life. You know better now. My life has become full and

rich, for Love fills my life. It is the keynote of my nature, the
foundation, the motive power. It inspires me to make the most of any
gift or talent that I have. How could I tell you all this if I did not know
that your own feeling was as deep. I could not have given the one, great,
and only love of my life in exchange for a half-hearted affection from
you. But you will never again make the mistake of supposing that any
material consideration can affect our love.
And now we won't be serious any longer. Dear mother was very much
astounded by your tumultuous midnight arrival, and equally precipitate
departure next morning. Dear old boy, it was so nice of you! But you
won't ever have horrid black humours and think miserable things any
more, will you? But if you must have dark days, now is your time, for I
can't possibly permit any after the 30th.-- Ever your own
MAUDE.
Woking, June 11th.
My Own Dearest Girlie,--How perfectly sweet you are! I read and re-
read your letter, and I understand more and more how infinitely your
nature is above mine. And your conception of love--how lofty and
unselfish it is! How could I lower it by thinking that any worldly thing
could be weighed for an instant against it! And yet it was just my
jealous love for you, and my keenness that you should never be the
worse through me, which led me to write in that way, so I will not
blame myself too much. I am really glad that the cloud came, for the
sunshine is so much brighter afterwards. And I seem to know you so
much better, and to see so much more deeply into your nature. I knew
that my own passion for you was the very essence of my soul--oh, how
hard it is to put the extreme of emotion into the terms of human
speech!--but I did not dare to hope that your feelings were as deep. I
hardly ventured to tell even you how I really felt. Somehow, in these
days of lawn-tennis and afternoon tea, a strong strong passion, such a
passion as one reads of in books and poems, seems out of place. I
thought that it would surprise, even frighten you, perhaps, if I were to
tell you all that I felt. And now you have written me two letters, which
contain all that I should have said if I had spoken from my heart. It is
all my own inmost thought, and there is not a feeling that I do not share.
O Maude, I may write lightly and speak lightly, perhaps, sometimes,
but there never was a woman, never, never in all the story of the world,

who was loved more passionately than you are loved by me. Come
what may, while the world lasts and the breath of life is between my
lips, you are the one woman to me. If we are together, I care nothing
for what the future may bring. If we are not together, all the world
cannot fill the void.
You say that