Dec. 3d.
Dearest,--You will be pleased to hear that I feel gayer to-night, so
that I cannot, after all, be sickening for anything horrid. It is an
ungrateful practice, letting oneself go to vague fears of the future
when there is nothing wrong with the present. All these days during
which I have been steeped in gloom and have been taking pains to put
some of it into envelopes and send it to you were good days in
themselves. Life went on here quite placidly. The weather was sweet with
that touching, forlorn sweetness of beautiful worn-out things, of late
autumn when winter is waiting round the corner, of leaves dropping
slowly down through clear light, of the smell of oozy earth sending up
faint whiffs of corruption. From my window I saw the hills every day at
sunset, how wonderfully they dressed themselves in pink; and in the
afternoons, in the free hour when dinner was done and coffee not yet
thought of, I went down into the Paradies valley and sat on the coarse
gray grass by the river, and watched the water slipping by beneath the
osiers, the one hurried thing in an infinite tranquillity. I ought to
have had a volume of Goethe under my arm and been happy. I ought to have
read nice bits out of _Faust_, or about those extraordinary people in
the Elective Affinities, and rejoiced in Goethe, and in the fine days,
and in my good fortune in being alive, and in having you to love. Well,
it is over now, I hope,--I mean the gloom. These things must take their
course, I suppose, and while they are doing it one must grope about as
best one can by the flickering lantern-light of one's own affrighted
spirit. My step-mother looked at me at least once on each of these
miserable days, and said: 'Rose-Marie, you look very odd. I hope you are
not going to have anything expensive. Measles are in Jena, and also the
whooping-cough.'
'Which of them is the cheapest?' I inquired.
'Both are beyond our means,' said my step-mother severely.
And today at dinner she was quite relieved because I ate some _dicker
Reis_ after having turned from it with abhorrence for at least a week.
Good-by, dearest.