that admission a weapon in your
hands--yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering:
"Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."

There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me.
But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's
deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate
protection--as he has often made plain--to think, to know why I
do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And
I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that
would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms
drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same
breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse
of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your
deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of
good and evil, of right and wrong--I what I am, a creature
craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever
and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it. I
wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in
that sort of atmosphere.

Even if you were not a minister--if you were just plain man--and
I wish you were--I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I
have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses
may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures
(_vide_ Havelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology
of sex among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men
in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I
have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read
and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I
don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my
habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being
moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so
simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I
know myself, within certain limits--but men I do not know at all,
except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and
Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you
both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled
ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe
attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimatel