But their grief was joy to the agony of calm in which I made that decision. Not a tear came to my eye when I told it them; not a pulse stirred in my breast. How inconceivable to them all this agony. My husband was even still solicitous to preserve the form of a union, now no longer possible in reality. One of those formality doctors of the soul was sent for—his uncle Francis. O! after all the agony I had passed through, I might have been spared the sight of one of those whose words had sanctioned and stamped upon me, as if by the authority of God, all this misery. But how weak and idle to me were his words about theological sin and social infamy. They fell on my ear, in constant repetition, meaningless as the dropping of the beads of a rosary. He told me I was imperiling my soul, and he left me with some formal expression of pious horror, when I told him I would willingly incur that risk. * * * * * And now I was alone in the world—my life still before me—severed from every living relation—to be lived or ended. What new connections must I assume? Unsupported, helpless, alone, where should I go? What must I do? In those past ages the convent doors would have been open to me; but my intelligence, the intelligence of the very age in which I lived, forbade me the immolation of my living body and my free soul. And then came to me again the idea of suicide. I did not shrink from this thought superstitiously, as fearing to rush unbidden into the presence of the offended deities. I had no such thought. It meant to me only rest from this great burden and weariness of life—to lie down and sleep while it was yet day—to sleep forever. But I was too calm for the rashness of this act—too strong. If they, who retired to the cloister from a sense of a superstitious duty, willingly endured its burden, I, with larger intelligence, could not sink beneath their lower thought, and weakly die. No, I had committed no crime that I should die; nor were my past misfortunes a reason why I should voluntarily impose new ones upon my life to come. I knew I was in the world to live. Vigor of body, of mind, passions, desires, reason, all that goes to make up a human soul, were in the full tide of existence; and I was here surely not to contemplate death, but to fulfil the functions of life—of a new life. For I had absolutely died in that decision to live free from my bond. I was dead to all past relations and connections. I was dead to the social world around me, as if I had never lived before. The consciousness of my identity was gone. Every eye rested strangely upon me. I was as a child new born. I would have put out my hands simply as a child, for I was in the living world, again, a stranger; new born, with a life in perfect maturity. And so came the final question:—