[5 Clement Circle, Cambridge, Mass.]
Well my Dearest, your letter of the 22nd arrived this morning. It was a great pain and a great relief. It was a relief, instead of the state of puzzlement in which your cable left me – wondering what had happened to take you away from Cataumet – to know something definite. Itravels, trips and plansTSE's 1936 American trip;c4TSE's itinerary;b1 AM coming, and shall probably arrive on the evening of the 31st August, but perhaps the next morning. IAmericaWoods Hole, Falmouth, Massachusetts;i2TSE and EH arrange holiday at;a1 don’t know whether to wish that I were with you now – how I have wished that I might be transported immediately to your bedside – or to be glad that I am coming a little later when you will be better, and when we shall have both a week at first in Cambridge, and then, I hope, a week more exclusively together at Woods Hole. But you must not worry, we shall be together anyway.
It drives me exasperated, if I allow myself to dwell upon it, to think of what I believe I could do if we were together, in dealing with your problems – and that I could I hope prevent them from arising even – in comparison with what does happen. O do believe that I can help you to ‘straighten things out’ and then I can! and will when I come. All that you tell me makes my love and adoration and devotion radiate toward you more immensely than ever; and somehow or other it brings us still closer together. OfChristianityspiritual progress and direction;d6in EH's case;a6 course I think that you need to introduce more serenity into your spiritual struggles – not to think about making your life over ‘anew’, but to think just patiently and humbly of going with the same effort to make it gradually better – not to expect too much of oneself – andChristianitysins, vices, faults;d5perfection-seeking pride;b7 to be impatient or desperate about oneself for not being perfect is itself a sin of spiritual pride. As for that state of ‘waiting for things to happen’, don’t I know it! haven’t I had to struggle with myself when I find myself arranging my life according to the hope that ‘something will happen’! I believe that by surrendering this, one helps some unexpected blessing to come – but one must expect nothing. I am sure, between the lines, that you have been through things to which no one about you can respond – and one has to accept calmly that loneliness too. At present, what you have to do is to become a jelly, and be massaged and looked after, and not think ahead more than to the next meal or the next massage. AndSmith College;b1 you need have no fear of starting at Smith unprepared etc. Your attitude of liking and welcoming your pupils is all that matters; you don’t realise that you have a very strong and attractive personality, and that that is what will count in your teaching, and whether you are up to the minute in the details of your particular course of lectures or classes.
But I concentrate on seeing you in a month’s time, and I want you to think of that too. I turn to you with just as much, indeed with more dependence than six years ago, and if you can depend upon me and get from me as much strength as I have got and get from you, we become something like one person. As for your alternations of feeling – I do know that too! As for my own sins, I take comfort from the fable of the man who went to confession, and said agitatedly ‘Father, I have committed murder’. ‘Yes, my son’ said the priest gently, ‘and how many times?’ Anything that you tell me about yourself only increases my love and adoration, in making the object of that love and adoration still more real. Surely love like that is the real thing, and real not simply through me, or simply through you, but because of a real fitness between us. What I love is the real Emily, whom I don’t altogether know, but whom I get to know more and more; and it is so whatever Emily thinks of the real Emily when she gets glimpses of her. And mind you, I want to be loved for the real me too, and not merely for any appearance of me that you or anybody else can see. I pray tonight as every night to the Blessed Virgin Mary to help us.