It makes me feel as if I wanted to do something you didn’t like — flirt or something equally meaningless and mad — out of sheer cussedness.

I feel the same sometimes when you are extra possessive in your letters — stressing the ‘my own’ element — you remember our talk about it before you went away. Don’t do it, sweetheart. I can’t help being a wincing jade whom the first hint of a fetter makes keen on nothing but bolting. It makes me feel, too, that you’ve forgotten all you promised then about my personal development — or didn’t mean it, perhaps ? ? ? I just can’t be anybody’s in the way you mean. So that’s that.

Don’t misunderstand this, dear, or think, as you hint not very kindly in your last two letters, that I am reluctant to keep my promise. I only suggested that you should sign up for the extra two years because it’s so clear it would give us a firmer foundation to begin on, and give me time to accustom myself to the idea of being tied up. But having given my word, I should certainly keep it, if you insisted. I haven’t time to go into all the pros and cons now, as it’s a ballet night, but I’ll write you a long letter about it by the next mail.

I think also, dear, that you are being a little selfish about not getting married in a church. It’s not fair to say I don’t respect your ideas — I do — but I have to think of mother’s feelings as well. But, after all, such details are still very far off.

Well, good-bye now, dearest. Don’t frown. I think of you always. I enjoy your letters so much, more than I can possibly say. I love them. This is a short poor letter, but I’ll write again soon. Forgive your mad bad sad girl.

All my love, darling

Amy

Now she knew why he had so often stopped short while they were walking together, particularly, she recollected, in days following the mail boat’s arrival, and had fetched a great sigh, looking distractedly about him, or had ground his teeth like a bound man who had been struck a blow in the face. Probably it was the bitter sense of humiliation engendered by the coarsely flaunted indifference in such phrases that had prevented him from including some account of his love in the long discourses on his work and ambition which he had so often drifted into as they sat on the veranda. Knowing him as she did, she could guess how cruelly such treatment must have eaten into his warm heart and his proud spirit.

For, save for the glibly extravagant endearments at the beginning and the end, each of the letters had for its core the insistence that the writer was accepting Mr. Fatigay partly to satisfy most economically an impulse she despised and distrusted and partly because his devotion rendered him the most tractable partner she was likely to get.

“In these letters,” thought Emily, “the mean is hardly the product of the two extremes, as it is, when, in love as in arithmetic, so-and-so is to so-and-so as so-and-so is to so-and-so.”

This revelation, while it made her painful choice the heavier, left it still undecided, for how, more than ever, could she bear life with Mr. Fatigay when he was married to this woman, and see him, not merely loving another, but being tortured and debased? And how, more than ever, could she leave him now, and know him, not only lost to her, but lost to happiness and to himself?

“How can he? How can he?” groaned the unhappy creature, feeling her heart grow hot within her, while she dashed the scalding tears from her eyes with the knuckles of her clenched hand: “How can he crawl thus on his knees to his own destruction, crushing in his blind eagerness the heart that loves him so unutterably. So unutterably: that’s the curse of it, for, if I could but speak, would I not set maidenly modesty aside, and, taking him frankly by the hand, represent to him the waste, the folly, and the pity of it all? Then, perhaps, though it would be but an outside chance (Fifty to one? Twenty to one? Thirty-three to one?), he might awake suddenly, and, dashing the poisoned sweetmeat to the ground, turn breathless towards me, with ‘Emily, my good angel! My twice preserver! My consolation! My love!’ ”

And, intoxicated by the picture she had conjured up, she fell to wondering if only she might effect this by a combination of eloquent signs, and of thrusting the paltry letters before him, and of putting out books open at telling and relevant passages.

Is it well to wish thee happy? — having known

me — to decline

On a range of lower feelings and a narrower

heart than mine!

This might do as a revelatory conclusion, bringing about the crescendo of exclamations which now pealed like wedding bells on her inner ear.

But then, shaking her head at herself in sad admonition, she dismissed the wild plan from her mind. This was not, it is to be understood, from any tardy revival of old-fashioned conventionalism. Emily considered herself to be as modern, in the worthier sense, as any of her sex, and though she deprecated the way in which many of her contemporaries appeared to fling away all regard for graciousness and responsibility, and even for the true development of their lives, in order to loot and ravage a few masculine privileges, she was capable, as in the case of Loblulya and of her sane benevolence towards Henry, of acting with complete decisiveness and freedom whenever she felt it to be genuinely necessary. It was the harder achievement of applying cold reason to her daydream that now restrained her.

“How could any clumsy interposition of mine turn aside such a love as his?” she thought. “Is love less strong in its defense, or more so, when it is bestowed on the unworthy? And even if I could convince him that chivalry does not bind him there whence reason calls him insistently away, and could bring him to obey that call, what hope have I that he would forthwith turn to me? Did the black on whom he once so unflinchingly operated, without anesthetics, endeavor to kiss the steel which sawed at his gangrened limb?

“No! He would certainly spurn me as a self-seeking, malicious intriguer, none the less cruel in act because I protested that it was for the best. If he turned at all to another love, it would almost certainly be some coalblack mamma, or mammas, he would take to his bosom.” Here she shuddered.

“It is more likely, of course,” she proceeded, “that he would become a recluse, a hermit, and bury himself here in Boboma with his shattered ideal forever beside him, and that . . . yes! yes! that would be even worse. I would a hundred, nay, a thousand times rather that he found solace in some association which, however degraded, was at least healthy and natural, than that he should thus gratify the vilest and most selfish motive that has ever stirred in my breast.” And she curled her lip as she crushed forever the scarce-born wish to spoil for others what she could not have herself, unaware in her innocence that just there, perhaps, lay her closest point of similitude to the human female.

Who treads down an ill motive is generally elevated in the very act to a tall strong generosity, which may bring him too recklessly to engage himself in the opposite direction.