But will the world understand this? Perhaps it is the accident of my place and estate, that, surrounding me with what passes by the name of power, made me see its emptiness—that, uniting me to the highest representative of a religion in the person of a son who put it lightly off, made its meaningless character apparent—that, teaching me to strengthen a family distinction by the unconscious sacrifice of myself to him in whose control I had been somehow left, taught me to question if it were right, and at last to rise above and throw off the chains of an unnatural compliance. My intercourse and secret correspondence with you from my early girlhood taught you how wayward, how passionate I was; and those letters are so much a part of me that I cannot write anything again as they were written. You have preserved them; read them again, even to the days that followed my unnatural blood-kin union and its results. Blood-kin union it was. Intermarriage always. There was the marriage of my husband’s uncle John with my aunt Elizabeth, first cousins. Blood-kin union of my husband’s father and mother, third cousins. Intermarriage of my husband’s uncle, Henry Birkbeck, with Jane Gurney, third cousins. Intermarriage of my husband’s father with Mary Fowler, cousin of his first wife. Is it strange that such unions should prove unfortunate? Elizabeth Gurney and Jane Birkbeck only survived their marriages a year. Jane Gurney, my husband’s mother, lived but four or five years of marriage life. There, too, in the case of grandfather and aunt Agatha, was the anomaly of father and daughter marrying sister and brother. There was the marriage of my husband’s cousin Henry with Jane Birkbeck, his second cousin. Then came the marriage of Catharine Gurney with her first cousin, Edward Buxton. Then Rachel with Thomas Buxton, another pair of first cousins. About a year thence, after the interesting grief on his part at the death of his aunt Fry, our uncle Buxton, and his old Balls, John Henry brought about his marriage with me, both of us the great grandchildren of the same pair—I, a thoughtless girl then staying at Earlham, and he nearly twice my age. But I don’t blame them. Heaven knows their ignorance of my nature, and the utter want of congeniality in everything between his and me. You know the ideal my heart and passions craved, and you know this reality circumstances and family considerations brought me; and you know from the day of that marriage I was silent. For when body and soul were in this, at last, both gone, I resolved to bear all patiently and submissively—to act and be the lie to the last. Indeed, as years wore on, it became almost my nature. I lost my inner light, as they say. I became a woman to look down from my social position and dwell in the proprieties forever.