And suddenly she started up.  I saw in her eyes the light of old battles.  “Oh, it was a horror!” she cried, beginning to pace the floor.  “It seemed to me that I was living the agony of all the loveless marriages of the world.  I felt myself pursued, not merely by the importunate desires of one man—­I suffered with all the millions of women who give themselves night after night without love!  He came to seem like some monster to me; I could not meet him unexpectedly without starting.  I forbade him to mention the subject to me again, and for a long time he obeyed.  But several weeks ago he brought it up afresh, and I lost my self-control completely.  ‘Douglas,’ I said, ’I can stand it no longer!  It is not only the tragedy of my blind child—­it’s that you have driven me to hate you.  You have crushed all the life and joy and youth out of me!  You’ve been to me like a terrible black cloud, constantly pressing down on me, smothering me.  You stalk around me like a grim, sepulchral figure, closing me up in the circle of your narrow ideas.  But now I can endure it no longer.  I was a proud, high-spirited girl, you’ve made of me a colourless social automaton, a slave of your stupid worldly traditions.  I’m turning into a feeble, complaining, discontented wife!  And I refuse to be it.  I’m going home—­where at least there’s some human spontaneity left in people; I’m going back to my father!’—­And I went and looked up the next steamer!”

She stopped.  She stood before me, with the fire of her wild Southern blood shining in her cheeks and in her eyes.

I sat waiting, and finally she went on, “I won’t repeat all his protests.  When he found that I was really going, he offered to take me in the yacht, but I wouldn’t go in the yacht.  I had got to be really afraid of him—­sometimes, you know, his obstinacy seems to be abnormal, almost insane.  So then he decided he would have to go in the steamer with me to preserve appearances.  I had a letter saying that papa was not well, and he said that would serve for an excuse.  He is going to Castleman County, and after he has stayed a week or so, he is going off on a hunting-trip, and not return.”

“And will he do it?”

“I don’t think he expects to do it at present.  I feel sure he has the idea of starting mamma to quoting the Bible to me, and dragging me down with her tears.  But I have done all I can to make clear to him that it will make no difference.  I told him I would not say a word about my intentions at home until he had gone away, and that I expected the same silence from him.  But, of course—­” She stopped abruptly, and after a moment she asked:  “What do you think of it, Mary?”

I leaned forward and took her two hands in mine.  “Only,” I said, “that I’m glad you fought it out alone!  I knew it had to come—­and I didn’t want to have to help you to decide!”

10.  She sat for a while absorbed in her own thoughts.  Knowing her as I did, I understood what intense emotions were seething within her, what a terrific struggle her decision must have represented.