Not Pretty, but Precious | Page 4

perfect love. I wound my hopes about
her: I gave up all my life to her as if she had been my lover. I never
cared to form other friendships. I deprived myself of all possibilities of
making other ties of any sort, and with the first opportunity she
whistled me down the wind, and cared no more for me than if she had
never professed to love me. She had been my one bright thing--she was
sweet and winsome--the one golden gleam in my sombre life. My
future was bound up in her so completely that when she severed the
fine, close cords (brittle, yet so strong) which had bound us together for
years, she cut into my heart--nay more, wrested from me all my sweet
trusts and faiths. If she is false, who else in all God's earth is true? I pity
myself very much. You, of course, will not see why her marrying
should make a difference if we loved, and will call me selfish. Not so,
not so! She might have married as soon as it pleased her, and I should
have been glad. It would have made a difference, of course: she must in
some sort have been parted from me, but that I could have borne if it
made her happy. But from her acceptance of her lover--about whom we
will say nothing, save that he was the sort of man she had always held
in abhorrence--she has coolly ignored my right to any part or lot in her
fate. She had told me (or I, poor fool! thought so) every hope and fear
of her life: now she told me what she chose, and was astonished that I
expected more--hurt that I seemed changed and did not find my
friendship flourish on crumbs after being nourished for years from full
loaves--was quite unhappy that I cared so little for the minor concerns
of her life, when, good lack! I did not know what I might or might not
ask and not be snubbed; for once she told me there were things due to
the man one is going to marry (at that time she had not got to the extent
of saying whom one loves) that could not be spoken of to me. Of
course she had only to mention the fact to me to make it perfectly plain,
and henceforth he and his doings, his belongings and himself, all of
them of the tamest sort at best, were a sealed book to me. And again
she quenched a feeble effort of mine to get back to my old place, by
telling me such topics she could discuss only with her sister, "her
shadow sister" she prettily called her. So I am desolate!
Knowing this, you may understand in some degree what could induce a
little waif like me to accept such an offer as yours. I think no one in all

God's earth is more desolate than I. In my heart I bear always that
unforgotten love in my life. I have only a barren waste to show. It is as
if I had started from a lovely, radiant garden in the fair morning of my
life, in which I had left the bright, sweet rose of my love, and walking
along a narrow, dark path, had clasped hands with, and drawn my light
and warmth from, a figure walking close beside me; and though from
all sides as I walked forms had come to me, offering me fair fruits and
sweet flowers, I declined them all without ever a word of thanks, being
so content with my one companion. And suddenly, when all my youth,
all my prospects of other things, had gone, this idealized one had
withdrawn its hand-clasp, and turning on me a face I did not know,
faded into darkness, leaving me nothing but my broken hopes, a wreath
of withered flowers,
"Tangled down in chains about my feet."
You do not of course realize how the old French _émigré_ blood in my
veins, inherited from my father, makes this a very vital matter to me.
We cling to our hopes very tenaciously while they abide--then we are
distraught. We loved, my father and I, very few, but those with a
clinging oneness that is wellnigh pain: he loved my mother and
myself--that was all. Likewise I had my two: they having failed me, my
life is a blank. I have heard of empty-hearted people: I know now what
the phrase means. I am empty-hearted: I have not one hope, one
particle of faith, one real, honest desire, except to "drie my weir," as the
Scotch say, doing my duty as best I may, as it comes to me. But I have
a woman's hatred of pity: my cousins