n Blackwater to-night, in hopes of weather mending in the
morning."

Anticipating this course, he had already engaged rooms for us at the
"Fort George."

My heart fell, and I waited for my husband's answer. I was stifling.

"All right, Hobson. If it must be, it must," he answered.

I wanted to speak, but I did not know what to say. There seemed to be
nothing that I could say.

A quarter of an hour afterwards we arrived at the hotel, where the
proprietor, attended by the manageress and the waiters, received us with
rather familiar smiles.

THIRTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

When I began to write I determined to tell the truth and the whole
truth. But now I find that the whole truth will require that I should
invade some of the most sacred intimacies of human experience. At this
moment I feel as if I were on the threshold of one of the sanctuaries
of a woman's life, and I ask myself if it is necessary and inevitable
that I should enter it.

I have concluded that it _is_ necessary and inevitable--necessary to the
sequence of my narrative, inevitable for the motive with which I am
writing it.

Four times already I have written what is to follow. In the first case I
found that I had said too much. In the second I had said too little. In
the third I was startled and shocked by the portrait I had presented of
myself and could not believe it to be true. In the fourth I saw with a
thrill of the heart that the portrait was not only true, but too true.
Let me try again.

I entered our rooms at the hotel, my husband's room and mine, with a
sense of fear, almost of shame. My sensations at that moment had nothing
in common with the warm flood of feeling which comes to a woman when she
finds herself alone for the first time with the man she loves, in a
little room which holds everything that is of any account to her in the
world. They were rather those of a young girl who, walking with a candle
through the dark corridors of an empty house at night, is suddenly
confronted by a strange face. I was the young girl with the candle; the
strange face was my husband's.

We had three rooms, all communicating, a sitting-room in the middle with
bedrooms right and left. The bedroom on the right was large and it
contained a huge bed with a covered top and tail-boards. That on the
left was small, and it had a plain brass and iron bedstead, which had
evidently been meant for a lady's maid. I had no maid yet. It was
intended that I should e