And another time, on the way home from Pont-Aven: 

“Women of detail, women who indulge themselves in soul-wearying repetition of the little affairs of life, have driven more men to perdition than all the Delilahs ever created.”

And Katrine and he laughed together at his anathema, and went forward into a dusky French twilight, singing as they went.

Around her room she pinned the written slips which he gave at every lesson, Scripture which seemed perverted to uses other than its own: 

     “He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.

     “Live with Goethe’s Faust—­learn it.  You will understand Gounod’s
     better.

“All art comes from the same kind of nature.  If you didn’t sing yours, you would paint it, carve it, write it, play it out; for, if it is in you to create something artistic, nothing human can stop your doing it.

     “There are no mute, inglorious Miltons.  Every one who has the
     qualifications for success succeeds.”

As time passed the letters to her unknown benefactor became more and more intimate in tone by reason of her race and youth.  No answer ever coming to any of them, it was as though her thoughts were written and cast into the eternal silence.

Upon the second anniversary of her farewell to Francis Ravenel, which was soon after her return from Brittany to Paris, she took from the depths of an old trunk the mementos of that time which seemed to her so far away.  Such trifling things:  a pine cross tied with blue ribbon; a grass ring which he had made for her once in the barley-field; a note or two; a book of collected poems, marked.  Trifling things, indeed! but her heart throbbed with the sense of his presence as she held them in her hands.

In the next room Nora was clattering some tea things, making the plain, homely bustle that frequently keeps one sane.  Out-of-doors it was one of Paris’ divine gray days, with pinks and lavenders showing in the shadows; but neither the in-door noise nor the outside beauty held her.  She was back in the Carolinas with her first love; there was the odor of pine and honeysuckle in the Paris air, a harvest moon in the sky.

“To forgive and forget and understand.”

On the impulse of the moment she decided to write her story to the unknown with no names, telling the pain which haunted her always; the pain which she felt would be hers until the end.  Having finished the narrative, she concluded: 

“I am trying to make it very clear to you.  You have been, you are, so kind.  But I want you to know about me exactly as I am.  The world would say that this man did not treat me well.  He had faults; he had ignorances; we are none of us perfect; he was not a great man.  But he was just as I would have him.”

And, womanlike, she added a postscript: