Poor Folk

But the instant that YOU came into my life, you lightened the dark places in it, you lightened both my heart and my soul

but, to think that I should be forced to see that, in spite of your own troubles (of which I have been the involuntary cause), you live for me alone—you live but for MY joys and MY sorrows and MY affection! If you take the affairs of another person so to heart, and suffer with her to such an extent, I do not wonder that you yourself are unhappy.

You take things so much to heart that you never know what it is to be happy

Yet I hide, I carefully hide, this from every one. I would hide my person in the same way, were it not that daily I have to attend the office where I have to be constantly on my guard against my fellows. Nevertheless, merely to be able to CONFESS this to you renews my spiritual strength.

Yet I would rather die than not help you. If I cannot help you I SHALL die;

is matter of common knowledge, my Barbara, that the poor man ranks lower than a rag, and will never earn the respect of any one.

All the world is built upon the system that each one of us shall have to yield precedence to some other one, as well as to enjoy a certain power of abusing his fellows. Without such a provision the world could not get on at all, and simple chaos would ensue.

Also I am sending you a book of stories; some of which I have read myself, particularly one called "The Cloak." . . .

it is wonderful to think that one may live and yet be ignorant of the fact that under one's very nose there may be a book in which one's whole life is described as in a picture.

course it is a sad and sorry thing to have to live among strangers, and to be forced to seek their patronage, and to conceal and constrain one's own personality— but God will help me. I must not remain forever a recluse, for similar chances have come my way before