Of course this treatment increased his love a thousandfold. It obsessed him to a painful degree, and in the end his desperate entreaties prevailed on her deep affection for him and she relented. Their marriage was not very happy, as may be imagined; they both loved to madness and the ghost of that dead passion stood ever between them, an invisible, poisonous presence that killed their joy in each other. After a time a deep melancholy settled on the woman, and she allowed some trifling illness to take such a hold on her that it caused her death. When she was dying, I am told, she said to her faithful friend: ‘If ever you meet another woman who has made one little slip--a thing which at the time seemed so natural and inevitable as not to be sin at all--tell her never _never_ to confess it to the man she is going to marry, least of all if she loves him. If that confession doesn’t part them altogether, it will always be between them. One does it wishing to be straight, but it’s the most dreadful mistake a woman can make.’ Her wish to be straight had cost this poor woman not only her whole life’s happiness, and her very life itself, but the happiness of the man she loved, in whose interests she had made the confession that wrought the harm. ‘How dearly I have paid! how dearly I have paid!’ she used to say over and over again in her last illness. This is an absolutely true story, and it seems to me a burning injustice that a woman should suffer so bitterly for what would be absolutely disregarded in a man. I have no doubt there are many similar cases, and emphatically I say that such confessions are ill-advised. The ordinary conventional-thinking man placed in these circumstances would either throw a woman over, or marry her against his convictions. The extraordinary masculine code, for some reason beyond my feminine powers of comprehension, will not admit that a spinster who has had a lover, or even made one ‘false step,’ is a fit person to wed, though no man would object to marrying a widow, and many men take respondent _divorcées_ to wife. Even in the case of a rarely generous-minded, tolerant and understanding man, who judged the offence at its true computation, such knowledge would only prove disturbing and a source of insecurity to conjugal happiness. No good purpose of any kind can be served, and the ease which confession is proverbially supposed to gain for the sinner would be bought at a very heavy price.