There was one more injury and degradation for me to suffer.  I recollect the first moment I saw the woman who wrought me so much misery afterward.  We were staying in Homburg for a few weeks at a hotel; and she was seated at a little table in a window, not far from the one where we were sitting.  A handsome, bold-looking, arrogant woman.  They had known one another years before, it seemed.  He said she was his cousin.  He left me to go and speak to her, and I watched them, though I did not know then that any thing more would come of it than a casual acquaintance.  I saw his face grow animated, and his eyes look into hers, with an expression that stirred something like jealousy within me, if jealousy can exist without love.  When he returned to me, he told me he had invited her to join us as my companion.  She came to us that evening.

She never left us after that.  I was too young, he said, to be left alone in foreign towns while he was attending to his business, and his cousin would be the most suitable person to take care of me.  I hated the woman instinctively.  She was civil to me just at first, but soon there was open war between us, at which he laughed only; finding amusement for himself in my fruitless efforts to get rid of her.  After a while I discovered it could only be by setting myself free from him.

Now judge me.  Tell me what I was bound to do.  Three voices I hear speak.

One says:  “You, a poor hasty girl, very weak yet innocent, ought to have remained in the slough, losing day by day your purity, your worth, your nobleness, till you grew like your companions.  You had vowed ignorantly, with a profound ignorance it might be, to obey and honor this man till death parted you.  You had no right to break that vow.”

Another says:  “You should have made of yourself a spy, you should have laid traps; you should have gathered up every scrap of evidence you could find against them, that might have freed you in a court of law.”

A third says:  “It was right for you, for the health of your soul, and the deliverance of your whole self from an intolerable bondage, to break the ignorantly-taken vow, and take refuge in flight.  No soul can be bound irrevocably to another for its own hurt and ruin.”

I listened then, as I should listen now, to the third voice.  The chance came to me just before I was one-and-twenty.  They were bent upon extorting from me that portion of my father’s property which would come to me, and be solely in my own power, when I came of age.  It had been settled upon me in such a way, that if I were married my husband could not touch it without my consent.

I must make this quite clear.  One-third, of my fortune was so settled that I myself could not take any portion of it save the interest; but the other two-thirds were absolutely mine, whether I was married or single.  By locking up one-third, my father had sought to provide against the possibility of my ever being reduced to poverty.  The rest was my own, to keep if I pleased; to give up to my husband if I pleased.