So much for my intellectual inner life.  My emotional inner life is less easy to indicate.  I became a woman at fifteen—­years, interminable years, before I left school.  I guessed even then, vaguely, that my nature was extremely emotional and passionate.  And I had nothing literary on which to feed my dreams, save a few novels which I despised, and the Bible and the plays and poems of Shakespeare.  It is wonderful, though, what good I managed to find in those two use-worn volumes.  I knew most of the Song of Solomon by heart, and many of the sonnets; and I will not mince the fact that my favourite play was Measure for Measure.  I was an innocent virgin, in the restricted sense in which most girls of my class and age are innocent, but I obtained from these works many a lofty pang of thrilling pleasure.  They illustrated Chopin for me, giving precision and particularity to his messages.  And I was ashamed of myself.  Yes; at the bottom of my heart I was ashamed of myself because my sensuous being responded to the call of these masterpieces.  In my ignorance I thought I was lapsing from a sane and proper ideal.  And then—­the second miracle in my career, which has been full of miracles—­I came across a casual reference, in the Staffordshire Recorder, of all places, to the Mademoiselle de Maupin of Theophile Gautier.  Something in the reference, I no longer remember what, caused me to guess that the book was a revelation of matters hidden from me.  I bought it.  With the assistance of a dictionary, I read it, nightly, in about a week.  Except Picciola, it was the first French novel I had ever read.  It held me throughout; it revealed something on nearly every page.  But the climax dazzled and blinded me.  It was exquisite, so high and pure, so startling, so bold, that it made me ill.  When I recovered I had fast in my heart’s keeping the new truth that in the body, and the instincts of the body, there should be no shame, but rather a frank, joyous pride.  From that moment I ceased to be ashamed of anything that I honestly liked.  But I dared not keep the book.  The knowledge of its contents would have killed my aunt.  I read it again; I read the last pages several times, and then I burnt it and breathed freely.

Such was I, as I forced my will on my aunt in the affair of the concert.  And I say that she who had never suspected the existence of the real me, suspected it then, when we glanced at each other across the breakfast-room.  Upon these apparent trifles life swings, as upon a pivot, into new directions.

I sat with my aunt while Lucy went with the note.  She returned soon with the reply, and the reply was: 

’So sorry I can’t accept your kind invitation.  I should have liked to go awfully.  But Fred has got the toothache, and I must not leave him.’

The toothache!  And my very life, so it seemed to me, hung in the balance.

I did not hesitate one second.