But Vanessa was not Stella. She was younger, more vehement, less disciplined, less wise. She had no Mrs. Dingley to restrain her. She had no memories of the past to solace her. She had no journals coming day by day to comfort her. She loved Swift and she knew no reason why she should not say so. Had he not himself taught her “to act what was right, and not to mind what the world said”? Thus when some obstacle impeded her, when some mysterious secret came between them, she had the unwisdom to question him. “Pray what can be wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? I can’t imagine.” “You have taught me to distinguish,” she burst out, “and then you leave me miserable.” Finally in her anguish and her bewilderment she had the temerity to force herself upon Stella. She wrote and demanded to be told the truth – what was Stella’s connexion with Swift? But it was Swift himself who enlightened her. And when the full force of those bright blue eyes blazed upon her, when he flung her letter on the table and glared at her and said nothing and rode off, her life was ended. It was no figure of speech when she said that “his killing, killing words” were worse than the rack to her; when she cried out that there was “something in your look so awful that it strikes me dumb”. Within a few weeks of that interview she was dead; she had vanished, to become one of those uneasy ghosts who haunted the troubled background of Stella’s life, peopling its solitude with fears.
Stella was left to enjoy her intimacy alone. She lived on to practise those sad arts by which she kept her friend at her side until, worn out with the strain and the concealment, with Mrs. Dingley and her lap-dogs, with the perpetual fears and frustrations, she too died. As they buried her, Swift sat in a back room away from the lights in the churchyard and wrote an account of the character of “the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend, that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with”. Years passed; insanity overcame him; he exploded in violent outbursts of mad rage. Then by degrees he fell silent. Once they caught him murmuring. “I am what I am”, they heard him say.