Alone of the two friends, you remain in your maiden independence; and
I beseech you, dearest, do not risk the irrevocable step of marriage
without some guarantee. It happens sometimes, when two are talking
together, apart from the world, their souls stripped of social
disguise, that a gesture, a word, a look lights up, as by a flash,
some dark abyss. You have courage and strength to tread boldly in
paths where others would be lost.
You have no conception in what anxiety I watch you. Across all this
space I see you; my heart beats with yours. Be sure, therefore, to
write and tell me everything. Your letters create an inner life of
passion within my homely, peaceful household, which reminds me of a
level highroad on a gray day. The only event here, my sweet, is that I
am playing cross-purposes with myself. But I don't want to tell you
about it just now; it must wait for another day. With dogged
obstinacy, I pass from despair to hope, now yielding, now holding
back. It may be that I ask from life more than we have a right to
claim. In youth we are so ready to believe that the ideal and the real
will harmonize!
I have been pondering alone, seated beneath a rock in my park, and the
fruit of my pondering is that love in marriage is a happy accident on
which it is impossible to base a universal law. My Aveyron philosopher
is right in looking on the family as the only possible unit in
society, and in placing woman in subjection to the family, as she has
been in all ages.
The solution of this great--for us almost awful
--question lies in our first child. For this reason, I would gladly be
a mother, were it only to supply food for the consuming energy of my
soul. Louis' temper remains as perfect as ever; his love is of the active,
my tenderness of the passive, type. He is happy, plucking the flowers
which bloom for him, without troubling about the labor of the earth
which has produced them.
Blessed self-absorption! At whatever cost to
myself, I fall in with his illusions, as a mother, in my idea of her,
should be ready to spend herself to satisfy a fancy of her child. The
intensity of his joy blinds him, and even throws its reflection upon
me. The smile or look of satisfaction which the knowledge of his
content brings to my face is enough to satisfy him. And so, "my child"
is the pet name which I give him when we are alone.