love you and hold you mine. Disagreeable of
me, but how else?

DANE.

X

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

LONDON.
Sunday, January 1, 19--.

Behold, I have lived! I press your face to the breathing, stinging roses
of my days, and bid you drink in the sweet and throb with the pain. What
is my philosophy but a translation of the facts which have stamped me?
Perhaps if I let you read these facts, you will the sooner come to share
my consecration and my faith. I must teach you to know that you are the
fact of my whole tangled web of facts, and that all that I have and am,
and all that might have been I and mine, stretches itself out in the
unmarked path which is before you.

I take you back with me to the road, white with dust, upon which like a
Viking and like a feeble girl I have travelled. It is not long, but how
many paths, what byways and what turns! What sudden glimpses of sea and
sky, what inaccessibleness! Hark, from the wood on either side
murmurings of hope and hard sobbing of despair, young laughter of joy
and aged renunciations! See from amongst the pines the farewell gleam of
a white hand. All of it dear--dearly bought and precious and miraculous,
the heartache even as the gladness.

"Life is worth living
Through every grain of it,
From the foundations
To the last edge
Of the cornerstone, death."

Ay, through every grain of it. Even that morning in the wood, thirty
years ago, when your mother put her hand in mine and looked a great pity
into my eyes. Indeed, she loved me well, but romance shone on the brow
of John Wace. For her his face was sunlit, and she needs must take it
between her hands and hold it forever. He was her Siegfried, her master.
Thus the gods decreed, and we three obeyed. What else was there to do?
We must be honest before all, and Ellen did not love me any more, and I
must know it, and wipe out a past of deepest mutuality, and strengthen
and console and restore the woman whose hand held mine while her eyes
were turned elsewhere.

Before that bright, black summer morning which saw me woman-pitied, I
knew I should have to renounce her. Their souls rushed together in their
first meeting. John had been away, knocking about museums and colleges,
and carrying on tempestuous radical work. He was splendidly picturesque.
I was a youth of twenty-three, almost ten years his junior, a boy full
of half-defined aims and groping powers, reaching toward what he h