er death.

LETTER I.

Beloved: This is your first letter from me: yet it is not the first I have
written to you. There are letters to you lying at love's dead-letter
office in this same writing--so many, my memory has lost count of them!

This is my confession: I told you I had one to make, and you laughed:--you
did not know how serious it was--for to be in love with you long before
you were in love with me--nothing can be more serious than that!

You deny that I was: yet I know when you first really loved me. All at
once, one day something about me came upon you as a surprise: and how,
except on the road to love, can there be surprises? And in the surprise
came love. You did not _know_ me before. Before then, it was only the
other nine entanglements which take hold of the male heart and occupy it
till the tenth is ready to make one knot of them all.

In the letter written that day, I said, "You love me." I could never
have said it before; though I had written twelve letters to my love for
you, I had not once been able to write of your love for me. Was not
_that_ serious?

Now I have confessed! I thought to discover myself all blushes, but my
face is cool: you have kissed all my blushes away! Can I ever be ashamed
in your eyes now, or grow rosy because of anything _you_ or _I_ think?
So!--you have robbed me of one of my charms: I am brazen. Can you love
me still?

You love me, you love me; you are wonderful! we are both wonderful, you
and I.

Well, it is good for you to know I have waited and wished, long before
the thing came true. But to see _you_ waiting and wishing, when the
thing _was_ true all the time:--oh! that was the trial! How not suddenly
to throw my arms round you and cry, "Look, see! O blind mouth, why are
you famished?"

And you never knew? Dearest, I love you for it, you never knew! I believe
a man, when he finds he has won, thinks he has taken the city by assault:
he does not guess how to the insiders it has been a weary siege, with
flags of surrender fluttering themselves to rags from every wall and
window! No: in love it is the women who are the strategists: and they have
at last to fall into the ambush they know of with a good grace.

You must let me praise myself a little for the past, since I can never
praise myself again. You must do that for me now! There is not a battle
left for me to win. You and peace hold me so much a prisoner, have so
caught me from my own way of living,