By and by she turned; her countenance had cleared; the dreamy look was gone out of her face, all indecision had vanished; the poise of her head and the firm set of her lips told that her resolution was formed.  She moved toward the table with all the old dignity in her carriage, and all the old pride in her mien.  She took up each letter in its turn, touched a match to it and watched it slowly consume to ashes.  Then she said: 

“I have landed upon a foreign shore, and burned my ships behind me.  These letters were the last thing that held me in sympathy with any remnant or belonging of the old life.  Henceforth that life and all that appertains to it are as dead to me and as far removed from me as if I were become a denizen of another world.”

She said that love was not for her—­the time that it could have satisfied her heart was gone by and could not return; the opportunity was lost, nothing could restore it.  She said there could be no love without respect, and she would only despise a man who could content himself with a thing like her.  Love, she said, was a woman’s first necessity:  love being forfeited; there was but one thing left that could give a passing zest to a wasted life, and that was fame, admiration, the applause of the multitude.

And so her resolution was taken.  She would turn to that final resort of the disappointed of her sex, the lecture platform.  She would array herself in fine attire, she would adorn herself with jewels, and stand in her isolated magnificence before massed, audiences and enchant them with her eloquence and amaze them with her unapproachable beauty.  She would move from city to city like a queen of romance, leaving marveling multitudes behind her and impatient multitudes awaiting her coming.  Her life, during one hour of each day, upon the platform, would be a rapturous intoxication—­and when the curtain fell; and the lights were out, and the people gone, to nestle in their homes and forget her, she would find in sleep oblivion of her homelessness, if she could, if not she would brave out the night in solitude and wait for the next day’s hour of ecstasy.

So, to take up life and begin again was no great evil.  She saw her way.  She would be brave and strong; she would make the best of, what was left for her among the possibilities.

She sent for the lecture agent, and matters were soon arranged.

Straightway, all the papers were filled with her name, and all the dead walls flamed with it.  The papers called down imprecations upon her head; they reviled her without stint; they wondered if all sense of decency was dead in this shameless murderess, this brazen lobbyist, this heartless seducer of the affections of weak and misguided men; they implored the people, for the sake of their pure wives, their sinless daughters, for the sake of decency, for the sake of public morals, to give this wretched creature such a rebuke as should be an all-sufficient evidence to her and to such as her, that there was a limit where the flaunting of their foul acts and opinions before the world must stop; certain of them, with a higher art, and to her a finer cruelty, a sharper torture, uttered no abuse, but always spoke of her in terms of mocking eulogy and ironical admiration.  Everybody talked about the new wonder, canvassed the theme of her proposed discourse, and marveled how she would handle it.