The Dangerous Age | Page 7

really free.
When you return home, stand firm if your friends overwhelm you with questions and sympathy. I should be deeply humiliated if anyone--no matter who--were to pry into the good and bad times we have shared together. Bygones are bygones, and no one can actually realise what takes place between two human beings, even when they have been onlookers.
Think of me when you sit down to dinner. Henceforward eight o'clock will probably be my bedtime. On the other hand I shall rise with the sun, or perhaps earlier. Think of me, but do not write too often. I must first settle down tranquilly to my new life. Later on, I shall enjoy writing you a condensed account of all the follies which can be committed by a woman who suddenly finds herself at a mature age complete mistress of her actions.
Follow my advice, offered for the twentieth time: go on seeing your friends; you cannot do without them. Really there is no need for you to mourn for a year with crape on the chandeliers and immortelles around my portrait.
You have been a kind, faithful, and delicate-minded friend to me, and I am not so lacking in delicacy myself that I do not appreciate this in my inmost heart. But I cannot accept your generous offer to give me money. I now tell you this for the first time, because, had I said so before, you would have done your best to over-persuade me. My small income is, and will be, sufficient for my needs.
The train leaves in an hour. Richard, you have your business and your friends--more friends than anyone I know. If you wish me well, wish that I may never regret the step I have taken. I look down at my hands that you loved--I wish I could stretch them out to you....
A man must not let himself be crushed. It would hurt me to feel that people pitied you. You are much too good to be pitied.
Certainly it would have been better if, as you said, one of us had died. But in that case you would have had to take the plunge into eternity, for I am looking forward with joy to life on my island.
For twenty years I have lived under the shadow of your wing in the Old Market Place. May I live another twenty under the great forest trees, wedded to solitude.
How the gossips will gossip! But we two, clever people, will laugh at their gossip.
Forgive me, Richard, to-day and always, the trouble I have brought upon you. I would have stayed with you if I could. Thank you for all....
ELSIE.
That my feeling for you should have died, is quite as incomprehensible to me as to you. No other man has ever claimed a corner of my heart. In a word, having considered the question all round, I am suffering simply from a nervous malady--alas! it is incurable!

MY DEAR MALTHE,
We two are friends, are we not, and I think we shall always remain so, even now that fate has severed our ways? If you feel that you have any good reason for being angry with me now, then, indeed, our friendship will be broken; for we shall have no further opportunity of becoming reconciled.
If at this important juncture I not only hid the truth from you, but deliberately misled you, it was not from any lack of confidence in you, or with the wish to be unfriendly. I beg you to believe this. The fact that I cannot even now explain to you my reasons for acting thus makes it all the more difficult to justify my conduct to you. Therefore you must be contented to take my word for it. Joergen Malthe, I would gladly confide in you, but it is impossible. Call it madness, or what you will, but I cannot allow any human being to penetrate my inner life.
You will not have forgotten that September evening last year, when I spoke to you for the first time about one of my friends who was going to separate from her husband, and who, through my intervention, asked you to draw the plan of a villa in which she might spend the rest of her days in solitude? You entered so completely into this idea of a solitary retreat that your plan was almost perfect. Every time we met last year we talked about the "White Villa," as we called it, and it pleased us to share this little secret together. Nor were you less interested in the interior of the house; in making sketches for the furniture, and arranging the decorations. You took a real delight in this task, although you were annoyed that you had no personal knowledge of your client. You remember that I said to you sometimes