Yet I wish they were not all destroyed.

Her letters to me were simple enough, written in a roundish,
unformed hand and badly phrased. Her first two or three showed a
shy pleasure in the use of the word "dear," and I remember being
first puzzled and then, when I understood, delighted, because she
had written "Willie ASTHORE" under my name. "Asthore," I gathered,
meant "darling." But when the evidences of my fermentation began,
her answers were less happy.

I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled in our
silly youthful way, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited,
to Checkshill, and made it worse, and how afterward I wrote a letter
that she thought was "lovely," and mended the matter. Nor will I
tell of all our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding. Always
I was the offender and the final penitent until this last trouble
that was now beginning; and in between we had some tender near
moments, and I loved her very greatly. There was this misfortune
in the business, that in the darkness, and alone, I thought with
great intensity of her, of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweet
and delightful presence, but when I sat down to write I thought of
Shelley and Burns and myself, and other such irrelevant matters.
When one is in love, in this fermenting way, it is harder to make
love than it is when one does not love at all. And as for Nettie,
she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries. It was not
my voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . . So our letters
continued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether
she could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not
believe in Church, and then hard upon it came another note with
unexpected novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suited