An Englishwomans Love-Letters | Page 4

me was baited with one
great pearl. So the mouse comes in with a meaning tied to its tail after
all!

LETTER IV.
In all the world, dearest, what is more unequal than love between a man
and a woman? I have been spending an amorous morning and want to
share it with you: but lo, the task of bringing that bit of my life into
your vision is altogether beyond me.
What have I been doing? Dear man, I have been dressmaking! and
dress, when one is in the toils, is but a love-letter writ large. You will
see and admire the finished thing, but you will take no interest in the
composition. Therefore I say your love is unequal to mine.
For think how ravished I would be if you brought me a coat and told
me it was all your own making! One day you had thrown down a mere
tailor-made thing in the hall, and yet I kissed it as I went by. And that
was at a time when we were only at the handshaking stage, the palsied
beginnings of love:--you, I mean!
But oh, to get you interested in the dress I was making to you
to-day!--the beautiful flowing opening,--not too flowing: the elaborate
central composition where the heart of me has to come, and the
wind-up of the skirt, a long reluctant tailing-off, full of commas and
colons of ribbon to make it seem longer, and insertions everywhere. I
dreamed myself in it, retiring through the door after having bidden you
good-night, and you watching the long disappearing eloquence of that

tail, still saying to you as it vanished, "Good-by, good-by. I love you so!
see me, how slowly I am going!"
Well, that is a bit of my dress-making, a very corporate part of my
affection for you; and you are not a bit interested, for I have shown you
none of the seamy side; it is that which interests you male creatures,
Zolaites, every one of you.
And what have you to show similar, of the thought of me entering into
all your masculine pursuits? Do you go out rabbit-shooting for the love
of me? If so, I trust you make a miss of it every time! That you are a
sportsman is one of the very hardest things in life that I have to bear.
Last night Peterkins came up with me to keep guard against any further
intrusion of mice. I put her to sleep on the couch: but she discarded the
red shawl I had prepared for her at the bottom, and lay at the top most
uncomfortably in a parcel of millinery into which from one end I had
already made excavations, so that it formed a large bag. Into the further
end of this bag Turks crept and snuggled down: but every time she
turned in the night (and it seemed very often) the brown paper crackled
and woke me up. So at last I took it up and shook out its contents; and
Pippins slept soundly on red flannel till Nan-nan brought the tea.
You will notice that in this small narrative Peterkins gets three names:
it is a fashion that runs through the household, beginning with the
Mother-Aunt, who on some days speaks of Nan-nan as "the old lady,"
and sometimes as "that girl," all according to the two tempers she has
about Nan-nan's privileged position in regard to me.
You were only here yesterday, and already I want you again so much,
so much!
Your never satisfied but always loving.

LETTER V.
Most Beloved: I have been thinking, staring at this blank piece of paper,

and wondering how there am I ever to say what I have in me here--not
wishing to say anything at all, but just to be! I feel that I am living now
only because you love me: and that my life will have run out, like this
penful of ink, when that use in me is past. Not yet, Beloved, oh, not yet!
Nothing is finished that we have to do and be:--hardly begun! I will not
call even this "midsummer," however much it seems so: it is still only
spring.
Every day your love binds me more deeply than I knew the day before:
so that no day is the same now, but each one a little happier than the
last. My own, you are my very own! And yet, true as that is, it is not so
true as that I am your own. It is less absolute, I mean; and must be so,
because I cannot very well take possession of anything when I am
given over heart and soul out of my own possession: there isn't enough
identity left in me, I am yours