Nov. 20.  I cannot write to-night, and yet I must, I must.  My head is bursting with thoughts and visions, my heart is swelling with new sensations.  What an evening I have had!  I shall never, never think myself courageous again.  I, who have faced crowds with calmness, to quail before forty or fifty men and women, not one of whom was more intelligent or better educated than myself!  But let me write it out if I can.  I accepted Mrs. Fordyce’s invitation to a little party.  It was graciously given, and I, fool that I was, thought it was to do me honor that I was asked.  I did not know then that these women of society will commit a baseness for a new sensation or to gratify an emotion of curiosity.  I have been so admired, so looked up to by the men who have surrounded me, I never dreamed of being the object of mere curiosity or amusement.  Well, I went.  The room was half full of men and women, talking, laughing, moving about.  I was alone, and from the moment of my entrance into that blaze of light I felt lonely and weak; but I crossed the room and spoke to my hostess.  She greeted me graciously, and then some one else came up, and I stood aside.  Suddenly the sense of eyes upon me came over me.  How those women stared!  Never before had I been among women and felt no bond of sisterhood.  How was it? was I unsexed, or they?  There seemed a gulf between us:  I read it in their eyes, it came to me in the air, a subtle but keen conviction.  And how exquisite they were!—­so soft and smooth and white, with no lines on their foreheads or creases round their mouths.  I had never had such a sense of beauty given me before by anything but pictures.  I wondered the men did not kneel to them:  I felt as if I could myself if they would let me.  As I stood there, my heart beating quick, and something in my throat beginning to choke me, dazzled and bewildered by the scene, a voice said—­oh how gently!—­in my ear, “Miss Linton, will you let me take you into the other rooms?  There are one or two pictures you will enjoy.”  I tried not to start, but I trembled in spite of myself, the relief was so great.  There we stood—­he, Henry Lawrence, taller and handsomer and prouder-looking than any man in the room, looking down upon me and offering me his arm!  I think I felt as I should if a lifeboat came to take me off a wreck—­in a modified degree, I mean.  I took his arm with a few rather inarticulate words of thanks, and we strolled through the other rooms, he listening to me with such earnest attentiveness, bending his head at every word, seeming so absorbed in me, so forgetful of the women who gazed at me as if I were a pariah, and the men who smiled on them as they did so.  I confess it, I felt as if he stood between me and the mocking, coldly scrutinizing glances about me.  I felt guarded, protected, and I could not struggle against the feeling, weak though I knew it was:  it seemed irresistible.  I suppose, being a woman like other women, I inherit traditional weakness, and cannot break the bonds of