Yet I take the further liberty of presuming that perhaps in those nine years I have not been wholly absent from your thoughts (as you, indeed, have lodged permanently in mine) and that you may agree with me, at least on our little private scale of things, that the past is not easily to be dismissed. Such a dismissal is what I must now seem to be attempting, since I find myself here in Plymouth with a trunk containing the residue of my possessions, which I will shortly accompany to the New World. New Life also, I would say, but I do not know whether the one thing confers the other—nor, if it does, whether I am fit subject for the metamorphosis. In deference to Old Life—our old life—I send you, since they have no place, I think, in the trunk, the notebooks that I began to keep after our poor Felix died, and kept, intermittently, until the dissolution of our marriage. What you will do with them—read them, ignore them, keep or destroy them—will not be for me to know. But I could not offer you this my last farewell (for that is what it is, my dear Liz) without offering you also the testimony of the man you once knew and (this is no presumption) loved.
