not see life through such narrow eyes, if you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting yourself in the other fellow’s shoes now and then, if only your creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital—­I—­but those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.

It’s no use, preacher man.  That day you kissed me on the creek bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of loving you—­but it was under protest—­under pretty much the same protest with which you care for me.  You were both times carried away so by your own passion that for the moment your mental reservations were in abeyance.  And although perhaps a breath of that same passion stirred me—­I can admit it now when the distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your hands—­yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering:  “Sophie, it won’t do.  You can’t mix oil and water.”

There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me.  But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father’s deliberate judgment.  He has schooled me for my ultimate protection—­as he has often made plain—­to think, to know why I do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap.  And I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of good and evil, of right and wrong—­I what I am, a creature craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it.  I wouldn’t make a preacher’s wife at all, I know.  I’d stifle in that sort of atmosphere.

Even if you were not a minister—­if you were just plain man—­and I wish you were—­I don’t know.  I have to try my wings, now that I have the opportunity.  How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses may take?  I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures (vide Havelock Ellis.  You’ll find two volumes of his psychology of sex among dad’s books) whose instincts incline toward many men in turn.  I don’t believe I am.  A woman’s destiny, in so far as I have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I’ve read and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children.  I don’t think I’m a variation from the normal type, except in my habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being moved by purely instinctive reactions.  I could be happy ever so simply, I think.  Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable.  I know myself, within certain limits—­but men I do not know at all, except in theory.  I have never had a chance to know men.  You and Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities.  I’ve liked you both.  You, dear freckle-face,