There is a great deal to say and I feel very incompetent to write it today. Last night I composed a great many letters to you, almost till three in the morning. I then wrote an imaginary letter and bared my very soul to you. This morning I don't feel so intimate. You mayn't value my pent up feelings and a tearful letter. I rather object to them not being properly received and left about ....
      .... Why am I raking all this up now? Only to tell you that all these years I have known all along that my life with you was very limited. I could never hope for it to become permanant. After all Lytton,you are the only person I have ever had an all absorbing passion for. I shall never have another. I couldn't now. I had one of the most self abasing loves a person can have. You could throw me into transports of happiness and dash me into deluges of despair, all by a few words. But these aren't reproaches. For after all it's getting on to six years since I first met you at Asheham and that's a long time to be happy. And I know that we shall always be friends until I die....
      .... Still, it's too much of a strain to be quite alone here waiting to see you or craning my nose and eyes out the top window at 41 Gordon Square to see if you are coming down the street....
      .... And as Ralph said last night you'll never leave us. Because in spite of our dullnesses, nobody loves you nearly as much as we do. So in the cafe in that vile city of Reading, I said I'd marry him. He knows I am not in love with him, but feels my affections are great enough to make him happy if I live with him....
      .... You never knew, or will ever know the very big and devastating love I had for you. How I adored every hair, every curl on your beard. How I devoured you whilst you read to me at night. How I loved the smell of your face in your sponge. Then the ivory skin on your hands, your voice, and your hat when I saw it coming along the top of the garden wall from my window. Say you will remember it, that it wasn't all lost and that you'll forgive me for this out burst, and always be my friend. Just thinking of you now makes me cry so that I can't see this paper, and yet so happy that the next moment I am calm ....
      .... Ralph is such a dear, I don't feel I will ever regret marrying him. Though I will never change my maiden name that I have kept for so long - so you mayn't ever call me anything but Carrington.
    

A letter from
Dora Carrington
to
Lytton Strachey
14 May 1921

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