death had marked also the death of my old
self.

Indeed, my first thought was of you. The message had said plainly that I
might consider myself the sole possessor of my secret. I was certain
that you did not know. I felt the desire to prevent you from ever
knowing; I felt the wildness of a tigress at the thought that any one
might take my secret from me. Between your hearing the truth about me
and my giving you up forever, I had no hesitancy of choice. You must
never know, I told myself. Though you were all that was left in my
life, I might send you away, but to tell you the truth about myself
would be, I believed, to end your love for me which was all that was
left to the comfort of my heart. And at that idea I screamed aloud in
agony.

I still possessed my conscience; I promised myself over and over again
in those hours that I would not deceive you. I did not think for a
moment then of asking you to take me with the understanding that you
knew there was some terrible thing about me which you were forbidden to
know. If in those moments, then, when you came to my room at dawn, I
made that bargain with you, so that I might feel your arms about me, and
know that I was not to lose you, it was the act of a woman who had just
lost her girlhood and whose life had been torn to shreds.

I made a terrible mistake. I know it now. The fact that you have
refrained so honorably from asking me the forbidden question and also
the fact of your keeping your promise to stay away during these last
days, though you were in ignorance of my motives in asking it, has shown
me that I might well have disclosed all to you. Without meaning to do
so, I have tested not only your honor but something more. I have proved
to myself that, behind your undemonstrative exterior which I have
sometimes felt was cold, you have that love and tenderness of spirit
which is capable of faith and loyalty and the warmth of which endures
the better because covered. I should have told you because the secret
has mocked me and because nothing can last between man and woman without
truth.

I should have told you, moreover, because you might have prevented the
terrible result of my knowledge of what I am in bone, blood, fibre, and
brain.

That knowledge began its corrupting influence at once; it accumulated
force as time went on. The irresistible pull of that knowledge has
brought me to the point where I know not whether it is heredity, or the
knowledge of it, whic