Ah dear heart, I wish you could read in my words what I feel! I wonder if I am dreaming when I live in this ideal of what a woman’s love can be--so complete and so utter a surrender, so complete a forgetting, a losing of the self, so complete a living in another heart! I am not afraid to ask just this from a woman--from you! For I have enough heart’s passion to satisfy every thirst that you may feel. Ah, Corydon, I want you! I am drunk with the thought of _making_ a woman to love. I wonder if any man ever thought of that before! Artists go about the world with the great hunger of their hearts, and expecting to find by chance another soul like the one they have spent years in making beautiful and swift and strong; but has anyone ever thought that instead of writing books that no one understands, he might be making another kind of an artwork--one that would be alive, and with sacred possibilities of its own? XV DEAR THYRSIS: Your last letters have been very beautiful. I see one thing--though you inform me that you believe you are a hard man, your natural gentleness and sympathy of heart would be the ruin of both of us in the future if I would permit it. But I think you can trust me, not ever as long as I live to lead you into weakness. My desperateness, before I received your letter saying that I might come with you, was rather dreadful; it made me doubt myself, for it was so difficult to keep myself from going to pieces. I have been wicked enough, to wonder whether I could ever make you feel as I felt for two days--if I could only bring to your heart that one pang, the only real one I ever felt in my life! But it taught me one thing, that the only road toward realization of life and one’s self is through suffering. I found out that I could bear, for it seems to me as I look back at that horrible nightmare, that it was almost by a superhuman effort I was able to read the letter at all. But enough of that! I think I have effectually cured myself of any weak yearning for your love. I go to you in gratefulness, knowing what I lack and what you need. Anything my love can do for you, it shall do. It may have some power--I sometimes think that it could have more than you realize. I suppose every woman has thought that the man she loved was her very life, but I do not think it of you, I simply _know_ it. I must go with you, whether I loved you or not. Meanwhile my love has assumed a strength to me that I never felt before. I don’t know how my wild and incoherent letters have affected you, but there were many times when I longed to get hold of you, literally, and simply shake into you some recognition of my soul. Oh, I am afraid you couldn’t get away from me; the more merciless you are to me, the wilder I get. I am possessed by so many opposite moods and influences. I am afraid of you a little. I never know what you are going to do to me.