always thinking about you,
scheming how to be with you again, when he is lying there so ill. How
good he has always been to me; it is terrible that love should pull
one apart so. Surely love should be beautiful, and peaceful, instead of
filling me with bitter, wicked thoughts. I love you--and I love him;
I feel as if I were torn in two. Why should it be so? Why should
the beginning of one life mean the ending of another, one love the
destruction of another? I don't understand. The same spirit makes me
love you and him, the same sympathy, the same trust--yet it sometimes
seems as if I were a criminal in loving you. You know what he thinks--he
is too honest not to have shown you. He has talked to me; he likes you
in a way, but you are a foreigner--he says-your life is not my life. 'He
is not the man for you!' Those were his words. And now he doesn't
talk to me, but when I am in the room he looks at me--that's worse--a
thousand times; when he talks it rouses me to fight--when it's his eyes
only, I'm a coward at once; I feel I would do anything, anything, only
not to hurt him. Why can't he see? Is it because he's old and we are
young? He may consent, but he will never, never see; it will always hurt
him.

"I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than
these--sometimes I have thought that I should never have the courage to
face the struggle which you have to face. Then I feel quite broken; it
is like something giving way in me. Then I think of you, and it is over;
but it has been there, and I am ashamed--I told you I was a coward. It's
like the feeling one would have going out into a storm on a dark night,
away from a warm fire--only of the spirit not the body--which makes it
worse. I had to tell you this; you mustn't think of it again, I mean
to fight it away and forget that it has ever been there. But Uncle
Nic--what am I to do? I hate myself because I am young, and he is
old and weak--sometimes I seem even to hate him. I have all sorts of
thoughts, and always at the end of them, like a dark hole at the end of
a passage, the thought that I ought to give you up. Ought I? Tell me.
I want to know, I want to do what is right; I still want to do that,
though sometimes I think I am all made of evil.

"Do you remember once when we were talking, you said: 'Nature always
has an answer for every question; you cannot get an answer from laws,
conventions, theories, words, only from Nature.' What do you say to me
now