I've been realizing of late that I have reached the Cape Horn of my own
life. I entered upon my engagement to Gordon honestly and hopefully, but
little by little I've grown doubtful of the outcome. The girl he loves
is not the ME I want to be. It's the ME I've been trying to grow away
from all this last year. I'm not sure she ever really existed. Gordon
just imagined she did. Anyway, she doesn't exist any more, and the only
fair course both to him and to myself was to end it.
We no longer have any interests in common; we are not friends. He
doesn't comprehend it; he thinks that I am making it up, that all I have
to do is to take an interest in his life, and everything will turn out
happily. Of course I do take an interest when he's with me. I talk about
the things he wants to talk about, and he doesn't know that there's a
whole part of me--the biggest part of me--that simply doesn't meet him
at any point. I pretend when I am with him. I am not myself, and if we
were to live together in constant daily intercourse, I'd have to keep on
pretending all my life. He wants me to watch his face and smile when he
smiles and frown when he frowns. He can't realize that I'm an individual
just as much as he is.
I have social accomplishments. I dress well, I'm spectacular, I would
be an ideal hostess in a politician's household--and that's why he likes
me.
Anyway, I suddenly saw with awful distinctness that if I kept on I'd
be in a few years where Helen Brooks is. She's a far better model of
married life for me to contemplate just this moment than you, dear Judy.
I think that such a spectacle as you and Jervis is a menace to society.
You look so happy and peaceful and companionable that you induce
a defenseless onlooker to rush off and snap up the first man she
meets--and he's always the wrong man.
Anyway, Gordon and I have quarreled definitely and finally. I
should rather have ended without a quarrel, but considering his
temperament,--and mine, too, I must confess,--we had to go off in a big
smoky explosion. He came yesterday afternoon, after I'd written him not
to come, and we went walking over Knowltop. For three and a half hours
we paced back and forth over that windy moor and discussed ourselves
to the bottommost recesses of our beings. No one can ever say the break
came through misunderstanding each other!