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"My dear Miss Stanley, when I talked to you the other afternoon
of work and politics and such-like things, my mind was all the
time resenting it beyond measure. There we were discussing
whether you should have a vote, and I remembered the last
occasion we met it was about your prospects of success in the
medical profession or as a Government official such as a number
of women now are, and all the time my heart was crying out within
me, 'Here is the Queen of your career.' I wanted, as I have
never wanted before, to take you up, to make you mine, to carry
you off and set you apart from all the strain and turmoil of
life. For nothing will ever convince me that it is not the man's
share in life to shield, to protect, to lead and toil and watch
and battle with the world at large. I want to be your knight,
your servant, your protector, your--I dare scarcely write the
word--your husband. So I come suppliant. I am five-and-thirty,
and I have knocked about in the world and tasted the quality of
life. I had a hard fight to begin with to win my way into the
Upper Division--I was third on a list of forty-seven--and since
then I have found myself promoted almost yearly in a widening
sphere of social service. Before I met you I never met any one
whom I felt I could love, but you have discovered depths in my
own nature I had scarcely suspected. Except for a few early
ebullitions of passion, natural to a warm and romantic
disposition, and leaving no harmful after-effects--ebullitions
that by the standards of the higher truth I feel no one can
justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no means
ashamed--I come to you a pure and unencumbered man. I love you.
In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property
and further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you
a life of wide and generous refinement, travel, books,
discussion, and easy relations with a circle of clever and
brilliant and thoughtful people with whom my literary work has
brought me into contact, and of which, seeing me only as you have
done alone in Morningside Park, you can have no idea. I have a
certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic, and I
belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of the
day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of
affairs, artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally,
mingle together in the easiest and most delightful intercourse.
That is my real milieu, and one that I am convinced you would not
only adorn but delight in.
"I find it very hard to write this letter. There are so many
things I want to tell you, and they stand on such different
levels, that the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant,
and I find myself doubting if I am really giving you the thread
of emotion that should run through all this letter. For although
I must confess it reads very much like an application or a
testimonial or some such thing as that, I can assure you I am
writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart. My mind
is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and
accumulating--dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching
quietly together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music
and all that side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and
shining in some brilliant throng--mine; of your looking at
flowers in some old-world garden, our garden--there are splendid
places to be got down in Surrey, and a little runabout motor is
quite within my means. You know they say, as, indeed, I have
just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written in a state of
emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad offers of
marriage. I have often felt before that it is only when one has
nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning.
And how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated
desires of what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly
sixteen months of letting my mind run on you--ever since that
jolly party at Surbiton, where we raced and beat the other boat.
You steered and I rowed stroke. My very sentences stumble and
give way. But I do not even care if I am absurd. I am a
resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I have got
it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have
wanted you. It isn't the same thing. I am afraid because I love
you, so that the mere thought of failure hurts. If I did not
love you so much I believe I could win you by sheer force of
character, for people tell me I am naturally of the dominating
type. Most of my successes in life have been made with a sort of
reckless vigor.
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