Chapter LXXV: Letter LXXV

Dearest: There is always one possibility which I try to remember in all I write: even where there is no hope a thing remains _possible_:--that your eye may some day come to rest upon what I leave here. And I would have nothing so dark as to make it seem that I were better dead than to have come to such a pass through loving you. If I felt that, dearest, I should not be writing my heart out to you, as I do: when I cease doing that I shall indeed have become dead and not want you any more, I suppose. How far I am from dying, then, now!

So be quite sure that if now, even now,--for to-day of all days has seemed most dark--if now I were given my choice--to have known you or not to have known you,--Beloved, a thousand times I would claim to keep what I have, rather than have it taken away from me. I cannot forget that for a few months I was the happiest woman I ever knew: and that happiness is perhaps only by present conditions removed from me. If I have a soul, I believe good will come back to it: because I have done nothing to deserve this darkness unless by loving you: and if _by_ loving you, I am glad that the darkness came.

Beloved, you have the yes and no to all this: _I_ have not, and cannot have. Something that you have not chosen for me to know, you know: it should be a burden on your conscience, surely, not to have shared it with me. Maybe there is something I know that you do not. In the way of sorrow, I think and wish--yes. In the way of love, I wish to think--no.

Any more thinking wearies me. Perhaps we have loved too much, and have lost our way out of our poor five senses, without having strength to take over the new world which is waiting beyond them. Well, I would rather, Beloved, suffer through loving too much, than through loving too little. It is a good fault as faults go. And it is _my_ fault, Beloved: so some day you may have to be tender to it.