You would try to hide it; but I would see you growing older hourly before my eyes.  You would smile—­I wonder if you know what sort of wonderful, alluring thing your smile is, Ian?—­and that smile would drive me to kill myself, and so hurt you still more.  And so it is always an everlasting circle of penalty and pain when you take the laws of life you get in the mountains in your hands and break them in pieces on the rocks in the valleys, and make new individual laws out of harmony with the general necessity.

“Isn’t it strange, Ian, that I who can do wrong so easily still know so well and value so well what is right?  It is my mother in me and my grandfather in me, both of them fighting for possession.  Let me empty out my heart before you, because I know—­I do not know why, but I do know, as I write—­that some dark cloud lowers, gathers round us, in which we shall be lost, shall miss the touch of hand and never see each other’s face again.  I know it, oh so surely!  I did not really love you years ago, before I married Rudyard; I did not love you when I married him; I did not love him, I could not really love any one.  My heart was broken up in a thousand pieces to give away in little bits to all who came.  But I cared for you more than I cared for any one else—­so much more; because you were so able and powerful, and were meant to do such big things; and I had just enough intelligence to want to understand you; to feel what you were thinking, to grasp its meaning, however dimly.  Yet I have no real intellect.  I am only quick and rather clever—­sharp, as Jigger would say, and with some cunning, too.  I have made so many people believe that I am brilliant.  When I think and talk and write, I only give out in a new light what others like you have taught me; give out a loaf where you gave me a crumb; blow a drop of water into a bushel of bubbles.  No, I did not love you, in the big way, in those old days, and maybe it is not love I feel for you now; but it is a great and wonderful thing, so different from the feeling I once had.  It is very powerful, and it is also very cruel, because it smothers me in one moment, and in the next it makes me want to fly to you, heedless of consequences.

“And what might those consequences be, Ian, and shall I let you face them?  The real world, your world, England, Europe, would have no more use for all your skill and knowledge and power, because there would be a woman in the way.  People who would want to be your helpers, and to follow you, would turn away when they saw you coming; or else they would say the superficial things which are worse than blows in the face to a man who wants to feel that men look to him to help solve the problems perplexing the world.  While it may not be love I feel for you, whatever it is, it makes me a little just and unselfish now.  I will not—­unless a spring-time madness drives me to it to-day—­I will not go with you.

“As for the other solution you offer, deceiving the world as to your purposes, to go far away upon some wild mission, and to die!