"Yet while you could not win me, in other ways you dominated me. Do
you remember the holidays when I came home from boarding-school, and
you were interne at a hospital? You asked me to go to the theater with
you, and at the last moment you were called to the operating room to
help one of the surgeons. You telephoned that you'd send a carriage
for me and my chaperon, but that you couldn't go;--and I wouldn't go
either, but stayed at home and sulked, and looked at myself in the
glass, now and then, to mourn over the fact that you couldn't see me
in my pink organdie with the rosebuds.
"But you wouldn't even apologize for what I called your neglect. I
said I should never go with you. You said it wasn't neglect, and that
I should go. And go I did, finally, as meekly as possible, and I wore
the pink organdie and had a lovely time.
"It's the memory of that night when you couldn't fit your plans to
mine which has made me write this letter. When I came home from Harbor
Light I found Bettina waiting up for me, and she broke down as the
depressing realities of your work were forced upon her. I was very
toploftical, Anthony--and was prepared to read her a sermon on the
duties of a doctor's wife, when all at once I had a vision of myself
in that rosebud organdie. I hated your work then, and I felt that you
lacked something of devotion to me, to let it keep you from me.
"But later I felt differently. The world began to call you a great
man--and I began to see with clearer eyes what you were doing for the
world. And so I helped you at Harbor Light, and saw you there at your
best--with your forceful control of all those helpless people, with
your steadiness of hand and eye, a king who ruled by virtue of his
power over life and death.
"It was in those days, I think, that I began to worship you. But I
never called my worship love. I wanted to be Me, Myself, and somehow I
felt that when I was once promised to you I should have no separate
identity. It was the rebellion of a strong personality against a
stronger one. I was not wise enough to see that you who protected
others from the storms of life might want some little haven of your
own--a haven which would be--Home.
"But because you failed to be masterful in the one way which would
have won me, because you said, always, 'Will you?' instead of,
'Come--let there be no more of this between you and me, Diana,' I went
away, not understanding you, not understanding myself.
"And over there with Sophie, I met Van Rosen. As I look back upon it,
I do not wonder that he charmed me. He was different from our American
men, a lover of pleasure. He typified the spirit of joy to me--there
was never a moment when he had not some vivid plan for me. We did
things of which I had always dreamed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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