did not execute that deed, I would sue him for a
settlement before I left the city. He did, and I took it home early in
the afternoon. In March '57, I resigned my place on the _Family Journal
and Visiter_, feeling that my public work was over, and that no life
save one of absolute solitude was possible for me.

I had lived over twenty years without the legal right to be alone one
hour--to have the exclusive use of one foot of space--to receive an
unopened letter, or to preserve a line of manuscript

"From sharp and sly inspection."

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a Pennsylvania court
decided that a husband had a right to open and read any communication
addressed to his wife. Living as I did, under this law I had burned the
private journal kept in girlhood, and the letters received from my
brother, mother, sister and other friends, to preserve their contents
from the comments of the farm laborers and female help, who, by common
custom, must eat at our table and take part in our conversation. At the
office I had received, read and burned, without answer, letters from
some of the most prominent men and women of the era; letters which would
be valuable history to-day; have, therefore, no private papers, and
write this history, except a few public dates, entirely from memory.

Into the mists some rays of light penetrated, and by them I saw that the
marriage contract by which I was bound, was that one which I had made
and which secured my liberty of conscience and voice in choosing a home.

The fraud by which church, and state substituted that bond made for
Saxon swine-herds, who ate boar's heads, lived in unchinked houses and
wore brass collars, in the days when Alfred the Great was king, was
such as would vitiate any other contract, and must annul even that of
marriage; but, granting that it was binding, it must bind both parties,
and had been broken by the party of the other part through failure to
comply with its requirements.

Our marriage had been a mistake, productive of mutual injury; but for
one, it was not too late to repair the wrong. He, a man in the prime of
life, with unspotted reputation, living without labor, on the income of
a patrimonial estate, to which he had made large additions, could easily
find a help-mate for him; one who could pad matrimonial fetters with
those devices by which husbands are managed. My desertion would leave
him free to make a new choice, and I could more easi