BRACERS Record Detail for 17059
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"Thursday. My Dearest—your letter is the greatest joy to have—I do feel your love about me, and it is a possession which is infinitely precious."
BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [23 MAR. 1911]
BRACERS 17059. ALS. Morrell papers #5, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell and A.G. Bone
Hotel Corneille
<Paris>1, 2
Thursday.
My Dearest
Your letter is the greatest joy to have — I do feel your love about me, and it is a possession which is infinitely precious. But oh dear how much difficulty there is ahead — I don’t see at the moment how things will work out. My serious and intended view is that our love would be degraded if we allowed it to be surrounded by the sordid atmosphere of intrigue — prying servants, tattling friends, and gradually increasing suspicion. All this is inevitable if we attempt secrecy: we cannot hope to succeed in it. If your love were not so precious to me, I should mind less; but I cannot bear to have it degraded. But to sacrifice you altogether, just when I have found you, is too much; I can’t face that. If you will tell Philip and let me tell Alys, I can acquiesce in your staying with him; then the deceit and sordidness is avoided. And then you can still help him politically. That seems to me the right course, as well as the most likely to minimize scandal. But whatever you say I shan’t give up the hope of everything. I have been told, and I believe, that your obstinacy is incredible; so is mine.
You ask me to hold you off before my mind’s eye and look at you in the position you choose. You do not “survive” well in a position involving deceit, but if that is eliminated, you do.
You really need not trouble yourself about your exact degree of intellect. In the first place, you may be quite sure that I am not idealizing it; nothing affects me one hair’s breadth in judging intellect. In the second place, it is not the thing I really want. No woman’s intellect is really good enough to give me pleasure as intellect. But love is altogether strange. I have taught my judgment to be impersonal, and if you hope to find it biassed, you will be disappointed; but love comes in a strange way that has nothing to do with theories. Indeed I should not trust it if it fitted too well with theories. It is plain to me that I love you — absolutely, devotedly, with all the passion of a fierce nature long starved and lonely. During these days, my love has grown with every hour — when I should have thought of my discourses here, I have thought of you, and all the eminent Frenchmen have passed like phantasms in a mist at sea. You need not fancy I shall have any difficulty in being patient with you. Where there is love, patience is hardly wanted. Dearest, your face and your voice and the whole of you are with me day and night, and your love is like a benediction in my soul. But you must, you shall, be worthy of the love that is the best in you and me; you shall not kill the new-born infant. A great love is a great responsibility: do not degrade us both by not living up to the best. I speak now with more certainty than on Sunday, because I have had time to think and know and feel. My life is bound up with you; it is my last chance of real happiness, or of a life that brings out my best. For you also — I will say it — such love is not to be despised. Goodbye my Dearest, Goodbye. My whole soul is yours.
B.