What I shall write to you will not be to cast a doubt upon our perfect and entire sympathy by any explanation, but to fulfil what I feel to be a duty towards you—to put you in possession of all that may weigh in the least degree with those at all understanding my nature, before whom you care to justify your steadfast attachment to me, though the performance of this duty, dear E * * *, may impose upon me the revelation of my inmost life. If, in your judgment, there will be here presented aught of such justification, show it to them, wholly or partially, just as you think well, remembering that this is for your sake, not my own. My justification it would be needful to make before a much wider tribunal, for I have perpetrated an act which the whole conventional world have leagued together, in ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy, to denominate a crime, and I could expect little or no sympathy from that wide bar of public judgment that knows nothing of me nor of my surroundings, and which never could be made to comprehend my nature; or, comprehending it, would not even then, at this day, be prepared to accept any argument or explanation in extenuation of my course. E * * *, you remember me at fourteen; you remember the time we returned from the visit to Wymondham; you remember how, repulsing the cold influences overcoming me in spite of myself, I dashed down in the carriage the plain bonnet they had asked me to wear that day, and stamped on it, and let all my hair fall down upon my shoulders, and said: I am free. You remember it well. And then, at last, when the carriage reached the house, how we threw ourselves into each other’s arms, and I had no more courage, and feared to avow the act, telling them you sat down on it—and you were still; and then how I cried all night, that I denied the truth of my nature—that I was not free. E * * *, that day repeated itself through my life—in every act, in the worship of God, in my marriage, in the very conception of my children; and I looked forward to its last repetition only in my death. It is past now—my living death is over. I have chosen between the universal condemnation of the world and my own sense of right; not in any sublime way, but in the simple, truthful way my nature craved. I lie down in the evening and rise in the morning, for the first time since a child, blessing God for my existence. Nothing can rob me of this now but death alone. I have that treasure to a woman’s heart that a woman can alone understand—the open avowal of the love that controls her being. With it, part of it, all of it, is the man, free from prejudice, filled with every noble aspiration, who is its object. Should I, I ask you, have preferred the reputation which the world accords to her who, yielding to its forms, becomes daily the living lie it approves?