An Englishwomans Love-Letters | Page 6

same exercise in
another direction. I kiss you more times than I can count: it is almost
really you that I kiss now! My very dearest, my own sweetheart, whom
I so worship. Good-night! "Good-afternoon" sounds too funny: is
outside our vocabulary altogether. While I live, I must love you more
than I know!

LETTER VII.
My Friend: Do you think this a cold way of beginning? I do not: is it
not the true send-off of love? I do not know how men fall in love: but I
could not have had that come-down in your direction without being
your friend first. Oh, my dear, and after, after; it is but a limitless
friendship I have grown into!
I have heard men run down the friendships of women as having little
true substance. Those who speak so, I think, have never come across a
real case of woman's friendship. I praise my own sex, dearest, for I
know some of their loneliness, which you do not: and until a certain
date their friendship was the deepest thing in life I had met with.
For must it not be true that a woman becomes more absorbed in

friendship than a man, since friendship may have to mean so much
more to her, and cover so far more of her life, than it does to the
average man? However big a man's capacity for friendship, the beauty
of it does not fill his whole horizon for the future: he still looks ahead
of it for the mate who will complete his life, giving his body and soul
the complement they require. Friendship alone does not satisfy him: he
makes a bigger claim on life, regarding certain possessions as his right.
But a woman:--oh, it is a fashion to say the best women are sure to find
husbands, and have, if they care for it, the certainty before them of a
full life. I know it is not so. There are women, wonderful ones, who
come to know quite early in life that no men will ever wish to make
wives of them: for them, then, love in friendship is all that remains, and
the strongest wish of all that can pass through their souls with hope for
its fulfillment is to be a friend to somebody.
It is man's arrogant certainty of his future which makes him impatient
of the word "friendship": it cools life to his lips, he so confident that the
headier nectar is his due!
I came upon a little phrase the other day that touched me so deeply: it
said so well what I have wanted to say since we have known each other.
Some peasant rhymer, an Irishman, is singing his love's praises, and
sinks his voice from the height of his passionate superlatives to call her
his "share of the world." Peasant and Irishman, he knew that his fortune
did not embrace the universe: but for him his love was just that--his
share of the world.
Surely when in anyone's friendship we seem to have gained our share
of the world, that is all that can be said. It means all that we can take in,
the whole armful the heart and senses are capable of, or that fate can
bestow. And for how many that must be friendship--especially for how
many women!
My dear, you are my share of the world, also my share of Heaven: but
there I begin to speak of what I do not know, as is the way with happy
humanity. All that my eyes could dream of waking or sleeping, all that
my ears could be most glad to hear, all that my heart could beat faster

to get hold of--your friendship gave me suddenly as a bolt from the
blue.
My friend, my friend, my friend! If you could change or go out of my
life now, the sun would drop out of my heavens: I should see the world
with a great piece gashed out of its side,--my share of it gone. No, I
should not see it, I don't think I should see anything ever again,--not
truly.
Is it not strange how often to test our happiness we harp on sorrow? I
do: don't let it weary you. I know I have read somewhere that great love
always entails pain. I have not found it yet: but, for me, it does mean
fear,--the sort of fear I had as a child going into big buildings. I loved
them: but I feared, because of their bigness, they were likely to tumble
on me.
But when I begin to think you may be too big for me, I remember you
as my "friend," and the fear goes for a time, or becomes that sort of fear
I would not