How I longed to throw my arms round your neck and abandon myself to
your embraces, but I was still strong enough in those days to hold back
for both our sakes.
Each time we were together I loved you more and more, and each time
when you had gone I seemed to see with clearer vision the fatal and
inevitable ending.
But I refused to give up the first real happiness that had been mine in
my short and stormy life, and so I clung desperately to my idle dream.
I prayed, I prayed for hours, Karl, that the war might end, for I felt
that in this lay our only hope--but what are one woman's prayers, a
sinful woman's prayers, to the Creator of all things, and the war
ground on in its endless agony just as it does to-night--Karl! Karl!
will this torture ever end?
But I must hurry, there is still much to tell you, and Time goes on
relentlessly just like the war; it is only life that ends. Then came
the days I took you to the shooting-box for the first time, and that
night I broke down and, unashamed, offered you myself. Think not too
badly of your Zoe, my Karl; when a woman loves as I do, what is
convention? A nothing, a straw on the waters of life. I wanted you for
my own, passionately and desperately, for I feared that any moment the
end might come, and to die without having felt your arms around me
would have added a thousand tortures to death. Though I could have
welcomed death with joy when I saw the look of sorrowful contempt which
you cast upon me that night.
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