1 Hanover
2 Dec 31st 1902
3
4 Darling,
5
6 I am sending you the money for the wire to Mrs Austin. Thank you so
7much.
8
9 Please ask John to let me know me know as soon as his plans are sure
10as to the time he leaves for Kimberley. Dear, I wonder if it is wicked;
11 but it seems so beautiful to me to think that perhaps this time next
12year I mayn’t be here. It come to me like such an exquisitely lovely
13thought. And yet I may have many years to go on still. One is
14satisfied if it is so; life is beautiful too. But death is more so.
15
16 I’ve been thinking a lot about Alice lately. You know its funny but I
17think now I understand her life as no one understood it; I put little
18things together & I understand it. Such a curious thing happened: you
19know not long before she died. (I cannot now say how long, but it must
20only have been a few very few months, because I was living in the same
21boarding house in London where I got that letter as w I was when I
22heard of her death, & I only lived there three months altogether), it
23I got a letter from her it was the last she ever wrote me.
24
25 I fancy it was just before you got to Fraserburg. I had write her a
26rather sympathetic letter about the death of all her children. I
27seldom wrote to her I don’t think I’d written to her for two years,
28but something made me write; & she wrote me back such a curious letter,
29 it was so unlike her, you who know she always wrote such little
30matter of fact letters about the children &c.
31
32 It was such a strange passionate out cry: "Oh Olive Olive, it is n’t
33the death of my little children that matters. My heart is broken but
34it’s not that that has done it. People sympathize with you & are sorry;
35 but its not the things they think if that have killed you." It was
36those words or all but those words, & then a few weeks afterwards I
37heard she was dead. I hope that letter of hers
38
39[page/s missing]
40
41