“I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than these —­sometimes I have thought that I should never have the courage to face the struggle which you have to face.  Then I feel quite broken; it is like something giving way in me.  Then I think of you, and it is over; but it has been there, and I am ashamed—­I told you I was a coward.  It’s like the feeling one would have going out into a storm on a dark night, away from a warm fire—­only of the spirit not the body—­which makes it worse.  I had to tell you this; you mustn’t think of it again, I mean to fight it away and forget that it has ever been there.  But Uncle Nic—­what am I to do?  I hate myself because I am young, and he is old and weak—­sometimes I seem even to hate him.  I have all sorts of thoughts, and always at the end of them, like a dark hole at the end of a passage, the thought that I ought to give you up.  Ought I?  Tell me.  I want to know, I want to do what is right; I still want to do that, though sometimes I think I am all made of evil.

“Do you remember once when we were talking, you said:  ’Nature always has an answer for every question; you cannot get an answer from laws, conventions, theories, words, only from Nature.’  What do you say to me now; do you tell me it is Nature to come to you in spite of everything, and so, that it must be right?  I think you would; but can it be Nature to do something which will hurt terribly one whom I love and who loves me?  If it is—­Nature is cruel.  Is that one of the ‘lessons of life’?  Is that what Aunt Constance means when she says:  ’If life were not a paradox, we could not get on at all’?  I am beginning to see that everything has its dark side; I never believed that before.

“Uncle Nic dreads the life for me; he doesn’t understand (how should he?—­he has always had money) how life can be tolerable without money—­it is horrible that the accident of money should make such difference in our lives.  I am sometimes afraid myself, and I can’t outface that fear in him; he sees the shadow of his fear in me—­his eyes seem to see everything that is in me now; the eyes of old people are the saddest things in the world.  I am writing like a wretched coward, but you will never see this letter I suppose, and so it doesn’t matter; but if you do, and I pray that you may—­well, if I am only worth taking at my best, I am not worth taking at all.  I want you to know the worst of me—­you, and no one else.

“With Uncle Nic it is not as with my stepfather; his opposition only makes me angry, mad, ready to do anything, but with Uncle Nic I feel so bruised—­so sore.  He said:  ’It is not so much the money, because there is always mine.’  I could never do a thing he cannot bear, and take his money, and you would never let me.  One knows very little of anything in the world till trouble comes.  You know how it is with flowers and trees; in the early spring they look so quiet and self-contained;