Learned by Heart

Your visit has done one thing, Lister - has proved that you haven't forgotten. Only please, don't remember me like this; call me to mind as I once was. Let me shine on, like a magic-lantern slide in your head. Rich and rare were the gems she wore. All I ask is for the memory of me to haunt you as you haunt me. Let our spirits touch and go on touching always, the way one page presses itself against the next.

I press my lips together hard. So the only way to show that my confinement is unnecessary is not to object to it? If I protest against my confinemeny, I only prove that I need to be confined?

But if it's true what Dr. Mather says about the mad being capable of a sustained performance of sanity, then I wonder how many people going about their business out there in the world may only be keeping their wildest impulses in check by means of such an immense and harmful effort of will. Like actors pretending with all their might, trapped in a play on which the curtain never comes down. And if one of them does manage to keep on the mask of a sane woman for her whole life, can she not be said to be sane enough, more or less, for all intents and purposes?

I thought we were sealed and one for ever. Was I gullible? Did you mean it then, even if you don't now? What I give, I don't, I can't take back. was yours a coward love? Did you tell me lies - or is love a story a lover tells in all sincerity, before time gives it the lie?