The Dangerous Age | Page 8

in joke: "Plan it as though it were for me"; and I cannot forget what you replied one day: "I hate the idea of a stranger living in the house which I planned with you always in my mind."
Judge for yourself, Malthe, how painful it was to leave you in error. But I could not speak out then, for I had to consider my husband. For this reason I avoided meeting you during the summer; I found it impossible to keep up the deception when we were face to face.
It is I--I myself--who will live in the "White Villa." I shall live there quite alone.
It is useless for me to say, "Do not be angry." You would not be what you are if you were not annoyed about it.
You are young, life lies before you. I am old. In a very few years I shall be so old that you will not be able to realise that there was a time when I was "the one woman in the world" for you. I am not harping on your youth in order to vex you--your youth that you hate for my sake! I know that you are not fickle; but I know, too, that the laws of life and the march of time are alike inexorable.
When I enter the new home you have planned for me, a lonely and divorced woman, I shall think of you every day, and my thoughts will speak more cordial thanks than I can set down coldly in black and white on this paper.
I do not forbid you to write to me, but, save for a word of farewell, I would prefer your silence. No letters exchanged between us could bring back so much as a reflection of the happy hours we have spent together. Hours in which we talked of everything, and chiefly of nothing at all.
I do not think we were very brilliant when we were together; but we were never bored. If my absence brings you suffering, disappointment, grief--lose yourself in your work, so that in my solitude I may still be proud of you.
You taught me to use my eyes, and there is much, much in the world I should like to see, for, thanks to you, I have learnt how beautiful the world is. But the wisest course for me is to give myself up to my chosen destiny. I shut the door of my "White Villa"--and there my story ends.
Your ELSIE LINDTNER.
Reading through my letter, it seems to me cold and dry. But it is harder to write such a letter to a dear friend than to a stranger.

LANDED ON MY ISLAND. CREPT INTO MY LAIR.
The first day is over. Heaven help me through those to come! Everything here disgusts me, from the smell of the new woodwork and the half-dried wallpapers to the pattering of the rain over my head.
What an idiotic notion of mine to have a glass roof to my bedroom! I feel as though I were living under an umbrella through which the water might come dripping at any moment. During the night this will probably happen. The panes of glass, unless they are very closely joined together, will let the water through, and I shall awake in a pool of water.
Awake, indeed! If only I ever get to sleep! My head aches and burns from sheer fatigue, but I have not even thought of getting into bed yet.
For the last year I have had plenty of time to think things over, and now I am at a loss to understand why I have done this. Suppose it is a piece of stupidity--a carefully planned and irrevocable folly? Suppose my irritable nerves have played a trick upon me? Suppose ... suppose ...
I feel lonely and without will power. I am frightened. But the step is taken; and I can never turn back. I must never let myself regret it.
This constant rain gives me an icy, damp feeling down my back. It gets on my nerves.
What shall I come to, reduced to the society of two females who have nothing in common with me but our sex? No one to speak to, no one to see. Jeanne is certainly attractive to look at, but I cannot converse with her. As to Torp, she suits her basement as a gnome suits his mountain cave. She looks as though she was made to repopulate a desert unaided. She wears stays that are crooked back and front.
Never in all my life have I felt so disappointed, and compelled to put a good face upon a bad business, as when I splashed through the wet garden and entered the empty house where there was not even a flower to welcome my arrival. The rooms are too large and bare.... Why did