I should do it well—­too well; destroy my soul in the performance.  Is a good name before such a world as this worth that sacrifice?  A convent and self-quenching;—­cloisters would seem to me like holy dew.  But that would be sleep, and I feel the powers of life.  Never have I felt them so mightily.  If it were not for being called on to act and mew, I would stay, fight, meet a bayonet-hedge of charges and rebut them.  I have my natural weapons and my cause.  It must be confessed that I have also more knowledge of men and the secret contempt—­it must be—­the best of them entertain for us.  Oh! and we confirm it if we trust them.  But they have been at a wicked school.

’I will write.  From whatever place, you shall have letters, and constant.  I write no more now.  In my present mood I find no alternative between rageing and drivelling.  I am henceforth dead to the world.  Never dead to Emma till my breath is gone—­poor flame!  I blow at a bed-room candle, by which I write in a brown fog, and behold what I am—­ though not even serving to write such a tangled scrawl as this.  I am of no mortal service.  In two days I shall be out of England.  Within a week you shall hear where.  I long for your heart on mine, your dear eyes.  You have faith in me, and I fly from you!—­I must be mad.  Yet I feel calmly reasonable.  I know that this is the thing to do.  Some years hence a grey woman may return, to hear of a butterfly Diana, that had her day and disappeared.  Better than a mewing and courtseying simulacrum of the woman—­I drivel again.  Adieu.  I suppose I am not liable to capture and imprisonment until the day when my name is cited to appear.  I have left London.  This letter and I quit the scene by different routes—­I would they were one.  My beloved!  I have an ache—­I think I am wronging you.  I am not mistress of myself, and do as something within me, wiser, than I, dictates.—­You will write kindly.  Write your whole heart.  It is not compassion I want, I want you.  I can bear stripes from you.  Let me hear Emma’s voice—­the true voice.  This running away merits your reproaches.  It will look like—.  I have more to confess:  the tigress in me wishes it were!  I should then have a reckless passion to fold me about, and the glory infernal, if you name it so, and so it would be—­ of suffering for and with some one else.  As it is, I am utterly solitary, sustained neither from above nor below, except within myself, and that is all fire and smoke, like their new engines.—­I kiss this miserable sheet of paper.  Yes, I judge that I have run off a line—­and what a line! which hardly shows a trace for breathing things to follow until they feel the transgression in wreck.  How immensely nature seems to prefer men to women!—­But this paper is happier than the writer.

‘Your Tony.’

That was the end.  Emma kissed it in tears.  They had often talked of the possibility of a classic friendship between women, the alliance of a mutual devotedness men choose to doubt of.  She caught herself accusing Tony of the lapse from friendship.  Hither should the true friend have flown unerringly.