questions poured forth. Somehow or other, in the end these questions froze and silenced me. I could not tell her, you were you! She would not have understood. Nor was I able to satisfy her completely on any point. I could not describe you, felt myself stammering like a schoolboy over the colour of your hair, your eyes. How could I say to her "This sweet lady who invites you to make her acquaintance is just perfection, no more nor less; all compound of fire and dew, made composite and credible with genius"? As for giving a description of you, it would need a poet and a painter working together, and in the end they would give up the task in despair. I did not tell Anne this.
She is now reviewing her wardrobe. And I … I am reviewing nothing … past definite thought. Do you know that when I left you on Sunday I feared that I had vexed or disappointed you again? You seemed to me a little cold—constrained. Monday and Tuesday I have examined and cross-examined myself—suffered. My whole life is yours—but if I fail to please you! I was in a hotel in the country once, when a man was brought in from the football field, very badly hurt. His eyes were shut, his face agonised; he moaned, for all his fortitude. There was a doctor in the crowd that accompanied him, who gave what seemed to me a strange order: "Put him in a hot bath, just as he is, don't delay a moment; don't wait to undress him." My own bath was just prepared and I proffered it. They lowered him in. He was a fine big fellow, but suffering beyond self-restraint. Within a minute of the water reaching him, clothes on and everything, he left off moaning.
