To Miss Hartley

I wrote this letter on a Thursday in the spring of my twenty-fourth year, and I never sent it. They say a man ought to burn the letters he does not send. I could never quite manage it with this one. It has moved house with me five times. I am an old man now, and I find I would rather it outlast me than not, so I am leaving it where it will be found, and if that is by you, then God has a stranger sense of humour than I ever credited Him with.

Here is what it said, and what I could not.

I have called at your father's house four times this spring on errands I must confess were half invented. The matter of the borrowed ledger could have been settled in a single visit and we both know it. I came back the other three times because I hoped to find you in the parlour, and twice I did, and on both occasions I stood there saying a great many sensible nothings about the weather while my actual purpose sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.

I admire you. Not your face only, though I think of it oftener than is dignified, but the quick way you have of answering, and how you did not pretend to find my joke funny last Tuesday when it plainly was not. I want a great deal more of that honesty in my life than a few stolen afternoons in a parlour can ever supply.

I meant to ask whether I might call on Sunday and say all of it to your face.

I did not. My nerve failed me on the doorstep. I went home. On Sunday I did not come, and you married Whitfield the following spring, and I have wondered every year since what that one missing hour might have made of two whole lives.

I hope it was a good life, Miss Hartley. I expect it was. I only wish I had let you decide it with all the facts laid out in front of you.