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, wrong or right, I did and do consider that in not doing so I sinned against no duty.  That I was constrained to act clandestinely, and did not choose to do so, God is witness, and will set it down as my heavy misfortune and not my fault.  Also, up to the very last act we stood in the light of day for the whole world, if it pleased, to judge us.  I never saw him out of the Wimpole Street house; he came twice a week to see me—­or rather, three times in the fortnight, openly in the sight of all, and this for nearly two years, and neither more nor less.  Some jests used to be passed upon us by my brothers, and I allowed them without a word, but it would have been infamous in me to have taken any into my confidence who would have suffered, as a direct consequence, a blighting of his own prospects.  My secrecy towards them all was my simple duty towards them all, and what they call want of affection was an affectionate consideration for them.  My sisters did indeed know the truth to a certain point.  They knew of the attachment and engagement—­I could not help that—­but the whole of the event I kept from them with a strength and resolution which really I did not know to be in me, and of which nothing but a sense of the injury to be done to them by a fuller confidence, and my tender gratitude and attachment to them for all their love and goodness,