December 24, 1908
KITEBROOK,
MORETON-IN-MARSH.
Dearest Robin,
I said I shouldn’t write to you any more till I got an answer to my last letter, but the two letters I have had from you this week seem in some kind of way an answer. [The two letters are Robin–December 1, 1908 and Robin–December 4, 1908.]
In one you say you almost wish you had told me nothing of all this. I wished that too at first, but I am glad now and I think you will be glad too. Two people could not live together quite happily, I think, if they felt they were trying to conceal anything.
You were right when you thought I should hate that second letter. I believe if you had not said you wished me to read it all I should have torn it up before I had finished the first page. Why did you write it, Robin? Why try to justify yourself by saying others have done the same? I hate excuses, and to me the excuse that others have done a thing is no excuse at all. I wish you were here that we might talk it out, it would be so much easier, for I don’t quite understand what is worrying you. If there is no real cause for people to talk, why should it matter the least what they say? Also you say people are not saying the things you thought they were, and there was no real reason for them to say the things anyway. You have told me that, Robin, so there seems nothing left to be unhappy about.
If you have “amused yourself”, as they say, with another girl before we were engaged, that isn’t exactly an offence against me, is it; though I have somehow never thought of that sort of thing in connection with you. It seems so utterly unlike the side of you that I know. I have always thought of you as so absolutely mine for ages, ever since that Heythrop ball in fact, though of course I had no shadow of a right to; but it made me very happy and now for ten days I have not been able to think of you as mine at all till yesterday when your letter seemed to say that things were not so very serious after all. They are going to go right for us, Robin, aren’t they?
I haven’t thanked you for your Christmas wishes yet and for the necklace which I am so looking forward to getting. It is sweet of you to send it me and I know I shall like it so much.
I don’t seem to have said very much that I meant to say in this letter but what I want you to understand is that you need not fear my thinking hardly of you. What other men have done and what other girls have forgiven them matter absolutely nothing to me. All I want is your assurance that all is right for us now, and surely then we need think no more of this?
You say you were “weak” and “mad” but surely, if that is all, the best thing we can do is to forget it, dear. We must help each other to do that.
With love,
Yours ever,
Kathleen