all those years i am sure i never bored him i have hoped as if he had loved me you mustn t think of him though as having been f tied to my skirts he came and went as be pleased did his fancies there was a girl once i am � telling you everything a lovely being who called the muse s tragedy poetry deep and gave him on his y he followed her to one summer and all the time that he was dangling after her a little too i always thought for a great man he was writing to me about his theory of � or was it his experiments in english the letters were dated from the very places where i knew they went and sat by together and he thought out for her hair he talked to me l about it quite frankly afterwards she was perfectly beautiful and it had been a pure delight to watch her but she talk and her mind he said elbows and yet the next year when her marriage was announced he went away alone quite suddenly and it was just afterwards that he published � s men are queer after my husband i am putting you i had a return of hope it w cause he loved me i argued that he had never spoken because he had always hoped some day to make me his wife because he wanted to spare me the reproach j rubbish i knew well enough in my heart of that my one chance lay in the force of habit he had grown used to me he was no longer young he dreaded new people and new ways ii avail son would it not be e o marry i i don t believe he ever thought of it he wrote i the muse s tragedy what people a beautiful letter he was kind considerate decently then after a few weeks he slipped into his old way of coming in every afternoon and our interminable began again just where they had left off heard later that people thought i had shown such good taste in not him � we on for five years longer perhaps they were the best years for i had given up hoping then i he died after his death � this is curious � there came to me a kind of of love ah the books and articles written about him all the of the life were i full of discreet allusions to i became again the of the glorious days sentimental girls and dear lads like you turned pink when somebody whispered that was you were talking to begged for my � urged me to write my reminiscences of him � critics consulted me about the reading of doubtful lines and i knew that to all these people i was the woman bad loved after a while that fire went out too and i was left alone with my past alone � quite alone for he had never really been with me the intellectual union counted for nothing now it had been soul to soul but never hand in hand and there were no little things to remember him by the muse s tragedy then set in a kind of winter crawled into myself as into a snow hut i hated m solitude and yet dreaded any one who disturbed it that phase of course passed like the others took j up life again and began to read the papers and the cut of my gowns but there was one tion that i could not be rid of that haunted night and day why had he never loved me had i been so much to him and no more was i s ugly so essentially that though a ma might cherish me as his mind s comrade he could not care for me as a woman i can t tell you how i that question tortured me it became an my poor friend do you begin to see i had to find out what some man thought of me don t be too hard on me listen first � consider when i first met i was a young woman who had married early and led the kind of life i had had no experiences from the hour of our first meeting to the day of his death i never looked at a other man and never noticed whether any other man i looked at me when he died five years ago i knew the extent of my powers no more than a baby was it too late to find out should i never know forgive me be an episode a mere me you are so young it will document to you s and besides it v t as s cold blooded the muse s tragedy s these lines have made it appear i didn t plan it like a in a book life is so much more complex than any rendering of it can be liked you from the first � i was drawn to you you must have i seen that � i wanted you to like me it was not a experiment and yet in a sense it i was that too i must be honest i had to have an er to that question it was a ghost that had to be i laid at first i was afraid � oh so much afraid � that you cared for me only because i was that you loved i me because you thought had loved me i be i to think there was no escaping my destiny how happy i was when i discovered that you were growing jealous of my past that you actually hated my heart beat like a girl s when you told me you meant to follow me to after our parting at villa d my old doubts re i asserted themselves what 