BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [29 July 1911]
BRACERS 17239. ALS. Morrell papers #159, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

In the train.1^, 2
Friday evening3

My Dearest Dearest

Yes, it was divine. I feel now no anxiety about the future, so far at least as our two selves are concerned. I feel now that I can give you what you need in order to feel justified — that things are permanently at a higher level than before, and that our love will bear fruit for the world as well as for ourselves. But for your feeling of dissatisfaction, we might have failed even to achieve the best that was possible. I have now an extraordinary sense of inward freedom, such as you seem to me always to have. I know I think what it was that troubled me on Monday, and it is something that troubles me no longer. Last week marked, as I thought, the end of a certain lyric freshness, like morning dew, that our love has had at times, tho’ not at the times when it has been deepest and most solemn. This quality is difficult to keep in a feeling which embraces the world and its sorrows — it demands some degree of oblivion. Yet in itself it is very beautiful. It was this that really troubled me. But by the time I came on Tuesday I saw things differently — I felt that the loss, if any, was very small and quite inevitable, but the gain was immeasurable.

I know that whatever the future may bring — even if it should part us and bring new ties — the inward tie with you will last so long as my life. You liberate my best, and make me know a wisdom to which my whole being responds: I feel that at last I see the world as it is natural to my best to see it. I have been slow to achieve inward harmony, and but for you I might have never achieved it. But now I possess it. All I have felt and thought is fused into a whole, in which I can live without constraint. And out of this inner harmony I feel the power to give a great gift to the world — our child.

Goodbye my dearest Love,

Your
B.

• 1

  [document] Document 000159. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.

• 2

  [envelope] ??.

• 3

  [date] Based on the letters' numbered sequence and their dates, and the obvious period away from Trinity and in Ottoline's presence.