. Oh! and we confirm it if we trust them.
But they have been at a wicked school.

'I will write. From whatever place, you shall have letters, and constant.
I write no more now. In my present mood I find no alternative between
rageing and drivelling. I am henceforth dead to the world. Never dead to
Emma till my breath is gone--poor flame! I blow at a bed-room candle, by
which I write in a brown fog, and behold what I am--though not even
serving to write such a tangled scrawl as this. I am of no mortal
service. In two days I shall be out of England. Within a week you shall
hear where. I long for your heart on mine, your dear eyes. You have faith
in me, and I fly from you!--I must be mad. Yet I feel calmly reasonable.
I know that this is the thing to do. Some years hence a grey woman may
return, to hear of a butterfly Diana, that had her day and disappeared.
Better than a mewing and courtseying simulacrum of the woman--I drivel
again. Adieu. I suppose I am not liable to capture and imprisonment until
the day when my name is cited to appear. I have left London. This letter
and I quit the scene by different routes--I would they were one. My
beloved! I have an ache--I think I am wronging you. I am not mistress of
myself, and do as something within me, wiser, than I, dictates.--You will
write kindly. Write your whole heart. It is not compassion I want, I want
you. I can bear stripes from you. Let me hear Emma's voice--the true
voice. This running away merits your reproaches. It will look like--. I
have more to confess: the tigress in me wishes it were! I should then
have a reckless passion to fold me about, and the glory infernal, if you
name it so, and so it would be--of suffering for and with some one else.
As it is, I am utterly solitary, sustained neither from above nor below,
except within myself, and that is all fire and smoke, like their new
engines.--I kiss this miserable sheet of paper. Yes, I judge that I have
run off a line--and what a line! which hardly shows a trace for breathing
things to follow until they feel the transgression in wreck. How
immensely nature seems to prefer men to women!--But this paper is happier
than the writer.

'Your TONY.'

That was the end. Emma kissed it in tears. They had often talked of the
possibility of a classic friendship between women, the alliance of a
mutual devotedness men choose to doubt of. She caught herself accusing
Tony of the lapse from friendshi