h emotion; I must stifle my desire to cry out
for your sympathy. I shall write without even the tenderness of a woman.

I am the daughter of a murderer.

In my veins is an inheritance of unspeakable, viciousness.

Before the death of him who I had believed all my life was my own
father, I was wholly in ignorance of my own nature. I believed that I
took from two noble parents the full assurance that I would be exempt
from weakness, that I, with brain cells formed like theirs, would
possess forever their tenderness, their geniality, and their strength of
will.

You know well how strong a faith I had in the power of inherited
character. To it I attributed all that was good in me. I realize now how
cruel is this doctrine of heredity; I have spent my strength and given
my soul in a battle to prove that I was wrong, that it is not a true
doctrine and that God and the human will can laugh in its face.

Without knowing my experience, however, you cannot know to what extent I
have been successful. I must tell the story of the tempests which have
swayed my mind, of the contests between good and evil, of the narrow
gate where my will has made its last defense against the onslaught of
terror and destruction.

To my task!

You remember the paper that I burned at dawn which my foster father had
dropped from his fingers, stiffening in death. It was his last message
to me, written in infinite pain and in an agony of doubt, intended to
warn me of the truth that I was not by inheritance strong, but weak, not
good, but bad. It told me that I was not the daughter of my mother,
whose gentle goodness seemed to fill the old home like a lingering
aroma, nor of him who was so strong and so respected of all men, but the
daughter of a pitiable woman of the tenements who had passed her days in
singing and dancing for pennies thrown at her, and of a man who, having
descended from a long line of exquisite savagery, self-indulgence, and
weakness, had been driven by his inheritance through all excesses and
finally to the murder of his wife and the wish to strangle me in my
crib.

Can you conceive the effect of this truth upon my mind?

At first I was merely frozen with terror. I did not fully grasp the
significance of these lines of writing in which he who loved me so well
had endeavored to soften for me his warning against the latent horrors
that had been locked up within me. At first I did not realize that the
same night which marked his