Dear Enemy

I've been realizing of late that I have reached the Cape Horn of my own

life. I entered upon my engagement to Gordon honestly and hopefully, but

little by little I've grown doubtful of the outcome. The girl he loves

is not the ME I want to be. It's the ME I've been trying to grow away

from all this last year. I'm not sure she ever really existed. Gordon

just imagined she did. Anyway, she doesn't exist any more, and the only

fair course both to him and to myself was to end it.

We no longer have any interests in common; we are not friends. He

doesn't comprehend it; he thinks that I am making it up, that all I have

to do is to take an interest in his life, and everything will turn out

happily. Of course I do take an interest when he's with me. I talk about

the things he wants to talk about, and he doesn't know that there's a

whole part of me--the biggest part of me--that simply doesn't meet him

at any point. I pretend when I am with him. I am not myself, and if we

were to live together in constant daily intercourse, I'd have to keep on

pretending all my life. He wants me to watch his face and smile when he

smiles and frown when he frowns. He can't realize that I'm an individual

just as much as he is.

I have social accomplishments. I dress well, I'm spectacular, I would

be an ideal hostess in a politician's household--and that's why he likes

me.

Anyway, I suddenly saw with awful distinctness that if I kept on I'd

be in a few years where Helen Brooks is. She's a far better model of

married life for me to contemplate just this moment than you, dear Judy.

I think that such a spectacle as you and Jervis is a menace to society.

You look so happy and peaceful and companionable that you induce

a defenseless onlooker to rush off and snap up the first man she

meets--and he's always the wrong man.

Anyway, Gordon and I have quarreled definitely and finally. I

should rather have ended without a quarrel, but considering his

temperament,--and mine, too, I must confess,--we had to go off in a big

smoky explosion. He came yesterday afternoon, after I'd written him not

to come, and we went walking over Knowltop. For three and a half hours

we paced back and forth over that windy moor and discussed ourselves

to the bottommost recesses of our beings. No one can ever say the break

came through misunderstanding each other!