© Peter Lofts Photography / National Portrait Gallery, London

By Vanessa Bell

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

Missus Woolf's bedroom--especially in April--was full of airy freshness. At first Tinker could distinguish nothing, blinded by the light. But again it was the smell of the room that overwhelmed him. Grassy notes of ivy carried by the breeze from the blossoming garden, smell of yellowish paper covered with mysterious incantations Tinker could not grasp, and, at last, familiar, soothing fragrance coming from the still silhouette at the writing desk. 

"Oh, Tinker !" said the figure.

The spaniels's restless mind was finally at ease in the arms of his mistress. 

Tinker could not read what she was scribbling in her ink-stained world above his head. But his senses knew just as clear as though he could comprehend every human word, how unusually captivated his mistress was as she wrote.