“My own life--what was it like? Well, outwardly it was a life of silence and inaction. My real life was an inward life--lived in my own heart. My heart was like a furnace. Shut up there, my love, my remorse, my despair at the past, my hopelessness of the future, a hundred nameless, restless, futile fears and longings, burned steadily all day long from day to day. Sometimes one emotion would be paramount, sometimes another. Sometimes memory would take possession of me; and, seated at my studio window, with my one relic of you clasped in my hand, I would go back, and live over again all that had passed between us, from the day when I first saw you, down to the day when, in this same room, I had put you from me. Do you remember that day--the day I first saw you? Do you remember our first speech together? And how awkward I was? and embarrassed? Do you remember the night of the party--New Year's Eve-- when the heel of your slipper broke off? And how jealous I was? And how angry you got with me? And how you scolded me? And then--in the carriage, going home? Do you remember your birthday? and mine? The silk handkerchief you embroidered for me with my initials? The concerts we used to go to together? and the little suppers afterward? The books we read together? _Detmold? The Portrait of a Lady?_ The poems you were so fond of? The letters we used to write to each other, even when we were going to see each other the very same day?... Or, perhaps, instead of sitting still here at my studio window, I would leave the house, and go for a walk in the old places--the places that were associated with our love, and now for me were sorrowfully consecrated by it. I would walk up Eighth Avenue, over the ground that I had used to cover every time I went to see you; would cross the great circle at Fifty-ninth Street; would come within eye-shot of your door, look up at your window, recall the time when I had had right of entrance, wonder what you were doing now; would enter the park, and even seek out our pine-trees, and stay for a while there in their shadow--there, where--! Do you remember? You may imagine whether this was bitter-sweet. To go back to the time when you had been mine, wholly mine, and live over all the rapture of that time, in all its minute, intimate details; and then, with an infinite hunger for you gnawing in my heart, to return to the present, look into the future, and realize that I, by my own act, had let you go, had lost you forever! You may imagine with what woe and fury, deep and frantic, and yet dumb, I would recall and repeat to myself that verse of Rossetti's poetry: 'Could we be so now?' And there was the truth, the relentless truth, for me to confront, and reconcile myself to, if I could: 'Not if all beneath heaven's pall lay dead but I and thou, could we be so now!' The truth which, as I said, was like a mountain of granite, separating you and me. Oh, but at other times I could not believe that the truth _was_ the truth.