I think that most of our
evenings will be spent in the room dedicated to a kind word for life
universal. No matter how closely the warring forces of existence,
within or without, have pressed upon us elsewhere, when we enter there
we enter peace. We shall be walled in, from all darkness of whatsoever
meaning; our better selves will be the sole guests of those luminous
hours. And surely no greater good-fortune can befall any household
than to escape an ignoble evening. To attain a noble one is like lying
calmly down to sleep on a mountain-top towards which our feet have
struggled upward amid enemies all day long.

Although we have now been two months married, I have not yet captured
the old uncapturable loveliness of nature which has always led me and
still leads me on in the person of Georgiana, I know but too well now
that I never shall. The charm in her which I pursue, yet never
overtake, is part and parcel of that ungraspable beauty of the world
which forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit--of that
elusive, infinite splendor of God which flows from afar into all
terrestrial things, filling them as color fills the rose. Even while I
live with Georgiana in the closest of human relationships, she retains
for me the uncomprehended brightness and freshness of a dream that does
not end and has no waking.

This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of my desire to enfold
her entire self into mine. We have been a revelation to each other,
but the revelation is not complete; there are curtains behind curtains,
which one by one we seek to lift as we penetrate more deeply into the
discoveries of our union. Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting
beside me, put her arm around my neck and look long into my eyes, full
of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at
what it means for a man and a woman to live together as we live. Yet,
folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfilment. Often
she appears to be vainly hovering on the outside of a too solid sphere,
seeking an entrance to where I really am. Even during the intimate
silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing
walls of flesh--we but cling together across the lone, impassable gulfs
of individual being.

During these October nights the moon has reached its fulness and the
earth been flooded with beauty.

Our bed is placed near a window; and as the planet sinks across the sky
i