never, never will I stoop to wanting anything else.

Do you begin to understand? It was all a sham then, you say? No, it was
all real as far as it went. You are young--you haven't learned, as you
will later, the thousand imperceptible signs by which one gropes one's way
through the labyrinth of human nature; but didn't it strike you,
sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about him?
His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round between
his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving the backs
of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little pungent Alpine
ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his way of always
calling me _you--dear you_, every letter began--I never told you a word
of all that, did I? Do you suppose I could have helped telling you, if he
had loved me? These little things would have been mine, then, a part of my
life--of our life--they would have slipped out in spite of me (it's only
your unhappy woman who is always reticent and dignified). But there never
was any "our life;" it was always "our lives" to the end....

If you knew what a relief it is to tell some one at last, you would bear
with me, you would let me hurt you! I shall never be quite so lonely
again, now that some one knows.

Let me begin at the beginning. When I first met Vincent Rendle I was not
twenty-five. That was twenty years ago. From that time until his death,
five years ago, we were fast friends. He gave me fifteen years, perhaps
the best fifteen years, of his life. The world, as you know, thinks that
his greatest poems were written during those years; I am supposed to have
"inspired" them, and in a sense I did. From the first, the intellectual
sympathy between us was almost complete; my mind must have been to him (I
fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he was never tired of