I can't even be sure that, if I could, I would go back to being the old
self before I committed the one big sin of my life, which gave me Jim's
father and mother, and the assurance that _he had cared_. For a while,
after Mother Beckett told me about Jim's love for "The Girl," in spite
of my wickedness I glowed with a kind of happiness. I felt that, through
all the years of my life--even when I grew old--Jim would be _mine_,
young, handsome, gay, just as I had seen him on the Wonderful Day: that
I could always run away from outside things and shut the gate of the
garden on myself and Jim--that rose-garden on the border of Belgium.
Now, when I know--or almost know--that he will come back in the flesh to
despise me, and that the gate of the garden will be forever shut--why, I
shall be punished as perhaps no woman has ever been punished before.
Still--_still_ I can't be sure that I would escape, if I could, by going
back to my old self!
It is writing of Belgium, and my days there with Brian while I still
hoped to see Jim, that brings all these thoughts crowding so thickly to
my mind, they seem to drip off my pen!
But what a different Ypres Father Beckett has now seen, and Brian
_felt_, from that dear, pleasant Ypres into which we two drove in a
cart, along a cobbled causeway as straight as a tight-drawn string!
Tourists who loved the blue, and yellow, and red bath-houses on the
golden beach of Ostend, didn't worry to motor over the bumpy road,
through the Flemish plain to Ypres.
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