(COPY OF TELEGRAM)
_From Frank Crosse_, to _Miss Maude Selby_,
_The Laurels_, _St. Albans_
Coming up eight-fifteen, arrive midnight.
_June_ 10_th_.
How good of you, dear old boy, to come racing across two counties at a
minute’s notice, simply in order to console me and clear away my
misunderstandings. Of course it was most ridiculous of me to take your
letter so much to heart, but when I read any suggestion about our
parting, it upset me so dreadfully, that I was really incapable of
reasoning about anything else. Just that one word PART seemed to be
written in letters of fire right across the page, to the exclusion of
everything else. So then I wrote an absurd letter to my boy, and the
dear came scampering right across the South of England, and arrived at
midnight in the most demoralised state. It was just sweet of you to
come, dear, and I shall never forget it.
I am so sorry that I have been so foolish, but you must confess, sir,
that you have been just a little bit foolish also. The idea of supposing
that when I love a man my love can be affected by the size of his house
or the amount of his income. It makes me smile to think of it. Do you
suppose a woman’s happiness is affected by whether she has a
breakfast-room, or a billiard-board, or a collie dog, or any of the other
luxuries which you enumerated? But these things are all the merest
trimmings of life. They are not the essentials. _You_ and your love are
the essentials. Some one who will love me with all his heart. Some one
whom I can love with all my heart. Oh the difference it makes in life!
How it changes everything! It glorifies and beautifies everything. I
always felt that I was capable of a great love—and now I have it.
Fancy your imagining that you had come into my life in order to darken
it. Why, you _are_ my life. If you went out of it, what would be left?
You talk about my happiness before I met you—but oh, how empty it all
was! I read, and played, and sang as you say, but what a void there was!
I did it to please mother, but there really seemed no very clear reason
why I should continue to do it. Then you came, and everything was
changed. I read because you are fond of reading and because I wanted to
talk about books with you. I played because you are fond of music. I
sang in the hope that it might please you. Whatever I did, you were
always in my mind. I tried and tried to become a better and nobler
woman, because I wanted to be worthy of the love you bore me. I have
changed, and developed, and improved more in the last three months than
in all my life before. And then you come and tell me that you have
darkened my life. You know better now. My life has become full and
rich, for Love fills my life. It is the keynote of my nature, the
foundation, the motive power. It inspires me to make the most of any
gift or talent that I have. How could I tell you all this if I did not
know that your own feeling was as deep. I could not have given the one,
great, and only love of my life in exchange for a half-hearted affection
from you. But you will never again make the mistake of supposing that
any material consideration can affect our love.
And now we won’t be serious any longer. Dear mother was very much
astounded by your tumultuous midnight arrival, and equally precipitate
departure next morning. Dear old boy, it was so nice of you! But you
won’t ever have horrid black humours and think miserable things any more,
will you? But if you must have dark days, now is your time, for I can’t
possibly permit any after the 30th.—Ever your own