Letters of Two Brides

Alone of the two friends, you remain in your maiden independence; and

I beseech you, dearest, do not risk the irrevocable step of marriage

without some guarantee. It happens sometimes, when two are talking

together, apart from the world, their souls stripped of social

disguise, that a gesture, a word, a look lights up, as by a flash,

some dark abyss. You have courage and strength to tread boldly in

paths where others would be lost.

You have no conception in what anxiety I watch you. Across all this

space I see you; my heart beats with yours. Be sure, therefore, to

write and tell me everything. Your letters create an inner life of

passion within my homely, peaceful household, which reminds me of a

level highroad on a gray day. The only event here, my sweet, is that I

am playing cross-purposes with myself. But I don't want to tell you

about it just now; it must wait for another day. With dogged

obstinacy, I pass from despair to hope, now yielding, now holding

back. It may be that I ask from life more than we have a right to

claim. In youth we are so ready to believe that the ideal and the real

will harmonize!

I have been pondering alone, seated beneath a rock in my park, and the

fruit of my pondering is that love in marriage is a happy accident on

which it is impossible to base a universal law. My Aveyron philosopher

is right in looking on the family as the only possible unit in

society, and in placing woman in subjection to the family, as she has

been in all ages.

The solution of this great--for us almost awful

--question lies in our first child. For this reason, I would gladly be

a mother, were it only to supply food for the consuming energy of my

soul. Louis' temper remains as perfect as ever; his love is of the active,

my tenderness of the passive, type. He is happy, plucking the flowers

which bloom for him, without troubling about the labor of the earth

which has produced them.

Blessed self-absorption! At whatever cost to

myself, I fall in with his illusions, as a mother, in my idea of her,

should be ready to spend herself to satisfy a fancy of her child. The

intensity of his joy blinds him, and even throws its reflection upon

me. The smile or look of satisfaction which the knowledge of his

content brings to my face is enough to satisfy him. And so, "my child"

is the pet name which I give him when we are alone.