BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 23 JAN. 1920
BRACERS 19607. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<Battersea>
January 23, 19201^,2

My Heart’s Love

Thank you for your dear letter.3 It was a wonderful evening yesterday — it is so divine when we are in unison, and all that is deep in our hearts comes to the surface. — I have loved you many ways since we first came together, and the way I love you now is the best. I do not know or imagine any better way of loving, but perhaps as the years go by some still better way may come, because there seems no limit to the growth of our love — I know that you give more of passion to others, but I hardly mind at all — I feel we have reached some place where passion hardly counts — It is very very difficult for me to tell you how or why I love you. Somehow everything that has to do with you feels important to me, I hate you to feel troubled and to be unhappy, I long with all my soul to help you with the courage that your life needs, and with the sense that there is some one in the world who cares for you, in your own self, independently of what you give. And what you give is precious to me beyond all words. I used to look to you for the warmth that would protect me from the pain of the world,4 and make me feel less alone — I wanted you to shield me in your arms. When you gave your physical love to other people and took it away from me (except once in a way), it put an end to that way of love — I had to face the world by my own strength — and for a time I thought I no longer really loved you — But then I came upon that other love that I had always had for you, less selfish and cowardly, but hidden from me by what I demanded of you — And now I do really get from you what I wanted before, but I could never have got it if I had not ceased to demand it. I can always talk to you of whatever I feel deeply — there is no one else in the world of whom that is true. I can feel near you when I am unhappy, and when you are unhappy — I feel as if nothing could come between us, you are so completely the breath of my life, the very fibre of all I think and feel. Sometimes I almost cease to feel that you are a separate person, I feel so one with you and so intimately moved by whatever moves you.

O my dear, life is very wonderful to me through you —

B

• 1

  [document] Document 200600.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 6 Mecklenburgh Square | W.C.1. Pmk: BATTERSEA SW11 | 11.46 PM | 23 JAN 20

• 3

  your dear letter Her brief letter of 22 January 1920 (BRACERS 113186).

• 4

  pain of the world BR used this phrase on more than one occasion in connection with Colette. It appears in his Autobiography when he writes about visiting the Cat and Fiddle with Colette. “We spent our days in long walks and our nights in an emotion that held all the pain of the world in solution, but distilled from it an ecstasy that seemed almost more than human” (Auto. 2: 27).