An Englishwoman's Love-Letters

An Englishwoman's Love-Letters

Laurence Housman

5.0
Comment(s)
70
View
2
Chapters

An Englishwoman's Love-Letters by Laurence Housman

An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Chapter 1 No.1

Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear; and it takes long thinking. Not merely such a quantity of thought, but such a quality, makes so hard a day's work that by the end of it I am quite drowsy. Bless me, dearest; all to-day has belonged to you; and to-morrow, I know, waits to become yours without the asking: just as without the asking I too am yours. I wish it were more possible for us to give service to those we love. I am most glad because I see you so often: but I come and go in your life empty-handed, though I have so much to give away.

Thoughts, the best I have, I give you: I cannot empty my brain of them. Some day you shall think well of me.-That is a vow, dear friend,-you whom I love so much!

J.

I have not had to alter any thought ever formed about you, Beloved; I have only had to deepen it-that is all. You grow, but you remain. I have heard people talk about you, generally kindly; but what they think of you is often wrong. I do not say anything, but I am glad, and so sure that I know you better. If my mind is so clear about you, it shows that you are good for me. Now for nearly three months I may not see you again; but all that time you will be growing in my heart; and at the end without another word from you I shall find that I know you better than before. Is that strange? It is because I love you: love is knowledge-blind knowledge, not wanting eyes. I only hope that I shall keep in your memory the kind place you have given me. You are almost my friend now, and I know it. You do not know that I love you.

K.

Beloved: You love me! I know it now, and bless the sun and the moon and the stars for the dear certainty of it. And I ask you now, O heart that has opened to me, have I once been unhappy or impatient while this good thing has been withheld from me? Indeed my love for you has occupied me too completely: I have been so glad to find how much there is to learn in a good heart deeply unconscious of its own goodness. You have employed me as I wish I may be employed all the days of my life: and now my beloved employer has given me the wages I did not ask.

You love me! Is it a question of little or much? Is it not rather an entire new thought of me that has entered your life, as the thought of you entered mine months that seem years ago? It was the seed then, and seemed small; but the whole life was there; and it has grown and grown till now it is I who have become small, and have hardly room in me for the roots: and it seems to have gone so far up over my head that I wonder if the stars know of my happiness.

They must know of yours too, then, my Beloved: they are no company for me without you. Oh, to-day, to-day of all days! how in my heart I shall go on kissing it till I die! You love me: that is wonderful! You love me: and already it is not wonderful in the least! but belongs to Noah and the ark and all the animals saved up for an earth washed clean and dried, and the new beginnings of time which have ever since been twisting and turning with us in safe keeping through all the history of the world.

"We came over at the Norman conquest," my dear, as people say trailing their pedigree: but there was no ancestral pride about us-it was all for the love of the thing we did it: how clear it seems now! In the hall hangs a portrait in a big wig, but otherwise the image of my father, of a man who flouted the authority of James II. merely because he was so like my father in character that he could do nothing else. I shall look for you now in the Bayeux tapestries with a prong from your helmet down the middle of your face-of which that line on your forehead is the remainder. And you love me! I wonder what the line has to do with that?

By such little things do great things seem to come about: not really. I know it was not because I said just what I did say, and did what I did yesterday, that your heart was bound to come for mine. But it was those small things that brought you consciousness: and when we parted I knew that I had all the world at my feet-or all heaven over my head!

Ah, at last I may let the spirit of a kiss go to you from me, and not be ashamed or think myself forward since I have your love. All this time you are thinking of me: a certainty lying far outside what I can see.

Beloved, if great happiness may be set to any words, it is here! If silence goes better with it,-speak, silence, for me when I end now!

Good-night, and think greatly of me! I shall wake early.

Continue Reading

You'll also like

Reborn Heiress: The Wolf's Vengeance Deal

Reborn Heiress: The Wolf's Vengeance Deal

Sibeal Sallese
5.0

I lay paralyzed on stiff white sheets, a prisoner in my own skin, listening to the rain lash against the window like nails on a coffin. My father, Elmore Franco, didn't even look at my face as he checked his clipboard. He just listened to the steady, monotonous beep of the heart monitor-the only thing proving I was still alive. Without a hint of remorse, he pulled a pen from his pocket and signed the Do Not Resuscitate order. My stepmother, Ophelia, stepped out from behind him, wearing my favorite pearl necklace and smelling of cloying perfume. She leaned close to my ear to whisper the truth that turned my blood to ice. "It was the tea, darling. Just like your mother. A slow, tasteless poison." She chuckled as she revealed that my fiancé, Bryce, had a two-year-old son with my sister, Daniela. My inheritance had been funding their secret life for years, and now that the money was secure, I was an inconvenience they were finally scrubbing away. As my father yanked the power cord from the wall, the beeping died, and the darkness swallowed me whole. I was being murdered by my own flesh and blood, used as a bank account until I was no longer needed. I died in that sterile room, drowning in the realization that every person I ever loved was a monster who had been waiting for me to take my last breath. Then, I gasped. I woke up in a luxury hotel suite surrounded by silk sheets, five years in the past-the very morning of my wedding. Next to me lay Basile Delgado, the "Wolf of Wall Street" and my family's most dangerous enemy. In my first life, I ran from this room in a panic and lost everything. This time, I looked at the man who would eventually destroy my father's empire and decided to join him. "I'm not leaving, Basile. Marry me. Right now. Today."

The Billionaire's Blind Bride: No Mercy

The Billionaire's Blind Bride: No Mercy

Emma
4.3

I married Clive Harrington, the coldest billionaire in Manhattan, under a strict contract that forbade any emotional burdens. When I needed a high-risk surgery to save my sight, I checked into the clinic alone, hiding the procedure from a husband who saw me as nothing more than a legal asset. I thought I could handle the darkness in silence. But while I was blind and bandaged in my hospital bed, my biological mother called, screaming that if I didn't produce a Harrington heir by the end of the fiscal year, she would cut off the life-saving treatments for my disabled sister. I was crawling on the cold hospital floor, desperately feeling for a cane I had dropped, when I touched a pair of expensive leather shoes. It was Clive. He was supposed to be in London closing a multi-million dollar deal, but there he was, watching his "contract wife" groveling in the dark like a beggar. He didn't walk away in disgust. He carried me to a five-thousand-dollar-a-night VIP suite and sat by my bed, listening in chilling silence as another voicemail from my mother filled the room, calling me a "useless broodmare" who was only worth the trust fund disbursements my marriage secured. I expected him to remind me of Clause 34B or hand me divorce papers now that I was "damaged goods." Instead, I felt his thumb brush a stray tear from my cheek, his presence shifting from a statue of ice into a predatory shield. "I thought I was just currency to you," I whispered, my voice trembling behind the gauze. "Just an investment." Clive didn't answer with words. He picked up his phone and called his head of legal with a single, terrifying command: "Kill the Douglas family’s credit lines. Every debt, every lien—trigger them all. If they want a war, I’ll give them a massacre." As he leaned down to kiss my bandaged forehead, I realized the contract was dead. My husband wasn't protecting an asset anymore; he was hunting the people who had dared to touch what belonged to him.

Chapters
Read Now
Download Book