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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

November 4, 1922

page 264

… Ever since my last letter to you I have been enraged with myself. It's so like me. I am ashamed of it. But you who know me will perhaps understand. I always try to go too fast. I always think all can be changed and renewed in the twinkling of an eye. It is most fearfully hard for me, as it is for you, not to be ‘intense.’ And whenever I am intense (really, this is so) I am a little bit false. Take my last letter and the one before. The tone was all wrong. As to any new truth—oh, Boge, I am really ashamed of myself. It's so very wrong. Now I have to go back to the beginning and start again and again tell you that I have been ‘over-fanciful,’ and I seem to have tried to force the strangeness. Do you know what I mean? Let me try now to face facts. Of course, it is true that life here is quite different, but violent changes to one's individualty—of course, they do not occur…

All my friends accepted me as a frail half-creature who migrated towards sofas. Oh, just wait and see how you and I will live one day—so happily, so splendidly. But in the meantime, please never take what I say for ‘absolute.’ I do not take what you say for ‘final.’ I try to see it as relative.