This inward conflict added to your attractions.  It gave you an air of nobility you had hitherto lacked.

Then the world began to whisper evil about you while you were still quite irreproachable.

No, after all there was something to reproach you with, although it was not known to outsiders.  While you were fighting your instincts and trying to live as a spotless widow, your character was undergoing a change:  against your will, but not unconsciously, you were become a perfect fury.  In this way your children acquired that timidity which they have never quite outgrown.  Strangers began to notice this after a while, and to criticise your behaviour.

Time went on.  You wrote that you were obliged to do a “cure” in a nursing home for nervous complaints.  When I heard this, I could not repress a smile, in spite of your misfortunes.  Nerve specialists may be very clever, but can they be expected, even at the highest fees, to replace defunct husbands.  You were kept in bed and dosed with bromides and sulphonal.  After a few weeks you were pronounced quite well, and left the home a little stouter and rather languid after keeping your bed so long.

When you got home you turned the house upside-down in a frantic fit of “cleaning.”  You walked for miles; you took to cooking; and at night, having wearied your body out with incessant work, you tried to lull your brain by reading novels.

What was the use of it all?  The day you confessed to me that you had walked about the streets all night lest you should kill yourself and your children, I realised that your powers of resistance were at an end.  A week later you had embarked upon your first liaison.  A month later the whole town was aware of it.

That was about a year after the Professor’s death.  Six or seven years have passed since then, and you have gone on from adventure to adventure, all characterised by the same lamentable lack of discretion.  The reason for this lies in your own tendency to self-deception.  You want to make yourself and others believe that you are always looking for ideal love and constant ties.  In reality your motives are quite different.  You hug the traditional conviction that it would be disgraceful to own that your pretended love is only an affair of the senses.  And yet, if you had not been so anxious to dupe yourself and others, you might have gone through life frankly and freely.

The night is far advanced, moreover it is Christmas Eve.

I will not accuse you without producing proofs.  Enclosed you will find a whole series of letters, dated irregularly, for you only used to write to me when I was away from home in the summer.  In these letters, which I have carefully collected, and for which I have no ground for reproaching you, you will see yourself reflected as in a row of mirrors.  Do not be ashamed; your self-deception is not your fault; society is to blame.  I am not sending the letters back to discourage or hurt you; only that you may see how, with each adventure, you have started with the same sentimental illusions and ended with the same pitiable disenchantment.