ible motive. I see that precisely as others may see
it. Indeed, if I were charged now with want of generosity for casting
myself so, a dead burden, on the man I love, nothing of the sort could
surprise me. It was what occurred to myself, that thought was, and
what occasioned a long struggle and months of agitation, and which
nothing could have overcome but the very uncommon affection of a very
uncommon person, reasoning out to me the great fact of love making its
own level. As to vanity and selfishness blinding me, certainly I
may have made a mistake, and the future may prove it, but still more
certainly I was not blinded _so_. On the contrary, never have I been
more humbled, and never less in danger of considering any personal
pitiful advantage, than throughout this affair. You, who are generous
and a woman, will believe this of me, even if you do not comprehend
the _habit_ I had fallen into of casting aside the consideration of
possible happiness of my own. But I was speaking of papa. Obvious it
was that the application to him was a mere form. I knew the result of
it. I had made up my mind to act upon my full right of taking my own
way. I had long believed such an act (the most strictly personal act
of one's life) to be within the rights of every person of mature age,
man or woman, and I had resolved to exercise that right in my own case
by a resolution which had slowly ripened. All the other doors of life
were shut to me, and shut me in as in a prison, and only before
this door stood one whom I loved best and who loved me best, and who
invited me out through it for the good's sake which he thought I
could do him. Now if for the sake of the mere form I had applied to
my father, and if, as he would have done directly, he had set up his
'curse' against the step I proposed to take, would it have been doing
otherwise than placing a knife in his hand? A few years ago, merely
through the reverberation of what he said to another on a subject like
this, I fell on the floor in a fainting fit, and was almost delirious
afterwards. I cannot bear some words. I would much rather have blows
without them. In my actual state of nerves and physical weakness, it
would have been the sacrifice of my whole life--of my convictions,
of my affections, and, above all, of what the person dearest to me
persisted in calling _his_ life, and the good of it--if I had observed
that 'form.' Therefore, wrong or right, I determined not to observe
it, and