Page:Love's trilogy.djvu/269

 fire of your body, I thank you that you taught me the unearthly happiness of earth-born love.

ARIE writes to me in a letter from her foreign town: 'My dear friend, this city is great and beautiful. There are wonderful art-collections and many well-kept parks. The streets swarm with merry people and one sees something new and interesting at every step. There are, too, plenty of theatres and concert-rooms and glorious confectioners' shops! My friends are sweet to me, they take me about from one show to another, and we go to the theatre every evening.

'If you were to ask me for any minute description of my life here, it would be impossible to give it, however much I might wish to do so. I watch heaps of people and heaps of things going by, but I remember nothing of it all. I am only longing all the time for night, that I can go to bed and be alone.

'Then I lie perfectly quiet, trying to live over again the last night I was with you. But there is such a noise in the streets here. The noise sounds like the murmur from a riotous crowd of people, and through the threatening hum I hear the coachmen's angry shouting and their lashing of their whips on the horses' backs. I was afraid the first few nights. I seemed to feel these lashes in my innermost heart, and trembling, I would creep under the coverlet. But then I thought that if it were only you who tortured me to death it would not be tor-