Why should I have loved him? Why do I love him? What is it I love in him? All this I have asked myself a thousand times, and there has never been, can never be, an answer to all this questioning. Yet I say now to you: Why should I not love him? What is there not to love in him? My heart only answers: What is there in me that I should be loved, that I should know that joy which in its tiniest moment makes all years of other time a mockery? And these questions do we ask each other daily and nightly forever. And yet there is one reason, they say, why I should not have loved him—one word there is which the world places as an impassable barrier between us—a word that has never crossed my lips till now—a meaningless word, and yet involving in their eyes a crime as great as that adultery which I commit—just as great, for both are equally meaningless as touching our relation. And that word expresses the social position he bore me. Rather than have been his lawful wife even, I might have been a king’s mistress, or any nobleman’s paramour, with less offence. And I, who was the reputable bawd of marriage rites, was I above him? I, a daily offence against decency in obedience to the same social law that would have forced him to life-long humility? Was I above him? How? In what way? I, sunk, in the abasement of my own weak unnatural compliance, below the veriest nameless outcast? Could I be above anything? Was he not at least my peer? He, who, if we leave too such vapid questions of distinction, is Hyperion to a Satyr compared in person with me—short, fat, little body that I am! I have silently asked myself in his arms, when I dared not soil our lips with their utterance, about these words—groom and adulterer. Yet well I knew that they had no relation to our love—that they were but words—that a true soul no social contamination defiles or degrades—that nobility unrecognized and virtue an outcast, wherever placed, are eternally the same. I had learned these lessons from a parent’s lips. The example of my own true-hearted mother had taught me this. My own life had been given me in violation of society’s teachings. Noble-hearted woman! who could say (I their child, and the only one that blessed at last their union, nearly a year old then:) Richard Gurney, I have withholden from you nothing; I have sacrificed all at the altar of love—even my little Marian—yet I ask no formal bond of union in return; I care not for it. What I had when our little one’s life began—what I have now—what I know nothing can deprive me of now—your love—contents me. And he as nobly answered: Not for the sake of it, Mary, for it will have but little acknowledgment from my kindred or the world; but for the pride of the open avowal, and for the sake of our little girl, I marry you.