LL]

MEMORANDUM OF MARTIN CONRAD

My darling was right. I had known all along, but I had been hoping
against hope--that the voyage would set her up, and the air of the
Antarctic cure her.

Then her cheerfulness never failed her, and when she looked at me with
her joyous eyes, and when her soft hand slipped into mine I forgot all
my fears, so the blow fell on me as suddenly as if I had never expected
it.

With a faint pathetic smile she gave me her book and I went back to my
room at the inn and read it. I read all night and far into the next
day--all her dear story, straight from her heart, written out in her
small delicate, beautiful characters, with scarcely an erasure.

No use saying what I thought or went through. So many things I had never
known before! Such love as I had never even dreamt of, and could never
repay her for now!

How my whole soul rebelled against the fate that had befallen my dear
one! If I have since come to share, however reluctantly, her sweet
resignation, to bow my head stubbornly where she bowed hers so meekly
(before the Divine Commandment), and to see that marriage, true
marriage, is the rock on which God builds His world, it was not then
that I thought anything about that.

I only thought with bitter hatred of the accursed hypocrisies of
civilised society which, in the names of Law and Religion, had been
crushing the life out of the sweetest and purest woman on earth, merely
because she wished to be "mistress of herself and sovereign of her
soul."

What did I care about the future of the world? Or the movement of divine
truths? Or the new relations of man and woman in the good time that was
to come? Or the tremendous problems of lost and straying womanhood, or
the sufferings of neglected children, or the tragedies of the whole
girlhood of the world? What did I care about anything but my poor
martyred darling? The woman God gave me was mine and I could not give
her up--not now, after all she had gone through.

Sometime in the afternoon (heaven knows when) I went back to Sunny
Lodge. The house was very quiet. Baby was babbling on the hearth-rug. My
mother was silent and trying not to let me see her swollen eyes. My dear
one was sleeping, had been sleeping all day long, the sleep of an angel.
Strange and frightening fact, nobody being able to remember that she had
ever been seen to sleep before!

After a while, sick and cold at heart, I went down to the shore where we
had played