you, when you were hungry I gave you food. Night and day all that
long winter I tended you. No office is too mean, no care too lowly
for the thing we women love - and oh! how I loved YOU. Not Hannah,
Samuel more. And you needed love, for you were weakly, and only
love could have kept you alive. Only love can keep any one alive.
And boys are careless often and without thinking give pain, and we
always fancy that when they come to man's estate and know us better
they will repay us. But it is not so. The world draws them from
our side, and they make friends with whom they are happier than
they are with us, and have amusements from which we are barred, and
interests that are not ours: and they are unjust to us often, for
when they find life bitter they blame us for it, and when they find
it sweet we do not taste its sweetness with them . . . You made
many friends and went into their houses and were glad with them,
and I, knowing my secret, did not dare to follow, but stayed at
home and closed the door, shut out the sun and sat in darkness.
What should I have done in honest households? My past was ever
with me. . . . And you thought I didn't care for the pleasant
things of life. I tell you I longed for them, but did not dare to
touch them, feeling I had no right. You thought I was happier
working amongst the poor. That was my mission, you imagined. It
was not, but where else was I to go? The sick do not ask if the
hand that smooths their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the
lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin. It was you
I thought of all the time; I gave to them the love you did not
need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs . . . And you
thought I spent too much of my time in going to Church, and in
Church duties. But where else could I turn? God's house is the
only house where sinners are made welcome, and you were always in
my heart, Gerald, too much in my heart. For, though day after day,