A bitterly sad time followed.  My dear mother was heart-broken.  To her, with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not pretend belief, was incomprehensible.  She recognised far more fully than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six, living alone.  She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of slander.  Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again than live “in Society” under the burden of an acted lie.

The hardest struggle was against my mother’s tears and pleading; to cause her pain was tenfold pain to me.  Against harshness I had been rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself on her knees before me, imploring me to yield.  It seemed like a crime to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy head was pressed against my knees.  And yet—­to live a lie?  Not even for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding agony my will clung fast to Truth.  And it is true now as it ever was that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and Peace.

Then there were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me, who was to them mother, nurse, and playfellow.  Were they, too, demanded at my hands?  Not wholly—­for a time.  Facts which I need not touch on here enabled my brother to obtain for me a legal separation, and when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for respectable starvation.  With a great price I had obtained my freedom, but—­I was free.  Home, friends, social position, were the price demanded and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my freedom.  I could have had a home with my brother if I would give up my heretical friends and keep quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs into fetters again, and in my youthful inexperience I determined to find something to do.  The difficulty was the “something,” and I spent various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of failures.  I tried fancy needle-work, offered to “ladies in reduced circumstances,” and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching.  I experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one the opportunity of adding to their incomes, and on sending the small fee demanded, received a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was to sell little articles of that description,