wretched, and myself as well; that you had absolutely nothing of the
things that I needed, and that the life which your nature required
was entirely different from mine; that you had no realization of the
madness that was driving me, could find and give me none of the
power I needed; and that I ought to write and tell you this, no
matter what it cost--that I owed it to the sacred possibility of my
own soul, to live alone if I could live better alone. And when I had
said these words, I felt a sense of relief, because they were
haunting me, and had been for a long time.

How they will affect you I cannot tell, it depends upon deep your
love for me is; certainly they mean for me that _my_ love is not
deep, that you have not made yourself necessary to me. I think that
in that last phrase I put the whole matter in its essence--you have
not _bound_ yourself to me; I am always struggling to keep my love
firm and right, to hold myself to you. The result is that there is
no food for my soul in the thought of our love, in my thought of
you; and therefore, I am continually dissatisfied and doubting,
continually feeling the difference between the love I have dreamed
and our love.

I tried to think the matter out, and get to the very bottom of it.
The first thing that came to me on the other side was your absolute
_truth_; your absolute devotion to what was right and noble in our
ideal. So that, as I was thinking, I suddenly stopped short with
this statement--"If you cannot find right love with that girl, it
must be because you do not honor love, or care for it." And then I
thought of your helplessness, of your lack of training and
opportunity for growth; and I told myself how absurd it was of me to
expect satisfying love from you--when all that I knew about in life,