‘I won’t have it!’ That had been her aunt’s command.  What right had her aunt to give any command upon the matter?  Then crossed Dorothy’s mind, as she thought of this, a glimmering of an idea that no one can be entitled to issue commands who cannot enforce obedience.  If Brooke and she chose to become man and wife by mutual consent, how could her aunt prohibit the marriage?  Then there followed another idea, that commands are enforced by the threatening and, if necessary, by the enforcement of penalties.  Her aunt had within her hand no penalty of which Dorothy was afraid on her own behalf; but she had the power of inflicting a terrible punishment on Brooke Burgess.  Now Dorothy conceived that she herself would be the meanest creature alive if she were actuated by fears as to money in her acceptance or rejection of a man whom she loved as she did Brooke Burgess.  Brooke had an income of his own which seemed to her to be ample for all purposes.  But that which would have been sordid in her, did not seem to her to have any stain of sordidness for him.  He was a man, and was bound to be rich if he could.  And, moreover, what had she to offer in herself, such a poor thing as was she, to make compensation to him for the loss of fortune?  Her aunt could inflict this penalty, and therefore the power was hers, and the power must be obeyed.  She would write to Brooke in a manner that should convey to him her firm decision.

But not the less on that account would she let her aunt know that she thought herself to have been ill-used.  It was an insult to her, a most ill-natured insult that telling her that Brooke had been a fool for loving her.  And then that accusation against her of having been false, of having given one reason for refusing Mr Gibson, while there was another reason in her heart, of having been cunning and then untrue, was not to be endured.  What would her aunt think of her if she were to bear such allegations without indignant protest?  She would write her letter, and speak her mind to her aunt as soon as her aunt should be well enough to hear it.

As she had resolved, she wrote her letter that night before she went to bed.  She wrote it with floods of tears, and a bitterness of heart which almost conquered her.  She too had heard of love, and had been taught to feel that the success or failure of a woman’s life depended upon that whether she did, or whether she did not, by such gifts as God might have given to her, attract to herself some man strong enough, and good enough, and loving enough to make straight for her her paths, to bear for her her burdens, to be the father of her children, the staff on which she might lean, and the wall against which she might grow, feeling the sunshine, and sheltered from the wind.  She had ever estimated her own value so lowly as to have told herself often that such success could never come in her way.  From her earliest years she had regarded herself as outside the pale within which such joys are to be found.  She had