“For these wars, where loveliness tilts against loveliness, my allies were the men. Compliment for me was never silent on their lips. I was the town's toast as I grew up. This put the women to an opposite course. As the men spoke of my beauty, the women shrugged their pure shoulders and told of my boldness; and I must confess that in a native vivacity, together with that rebellion of the spirit born of their attitude towards me, I gave them endless evidence to go upon. I have lived my life without an immorality or the shadow of one; I have done no wrong wherewith to shame myself; but, reckless, careless, and with the frank ignorance of innocence--and then, to be sure, because it made those others angry--I was greedy of men's praise, withal too free of speech and eye, and thereby offered tongues eager to assail me the argument required as material for their ill work. They, the women, wove for me as bad a story as they might, and then wrapped it about me for a reputation. How I loathed and hated them! those who, worsted of my beauty, would tear me with calumny by way of reprisal! “Now I must tell you, it was I who wearied first of that game where it was beauty on the one side against icy stare, arched brow, and covert innuendo on the other. No; my tongue would not have spared them--it was never a patient member, that tongue!--but for such artillery, as you would call it, my persecutors were out of reach. There is a gravity of words; they descend and never climb; they must, like a stone, come tumbling from above to do an injury. Wherefore these folk high up were safe from me--safe from everything except my beauty; and since I maintained myself without a stain upon my virtue, even my beauty wore for them and theirs no real peril. Above, on the cliffs of society, they rolled down tale and whisper against me like so many black stones; in retort, though I might be beautiful and so madden them with the possession of what they lacked, I from below could harm them nothing. I think, too, some in pain of their own ugliness, envied and would have changed places with me. They would not, had they known what I knew and felt what I felt. My soul was in torment, and I grew never so callous but the darts of their forked malignancy would pierce and pain. “It was to avoid conditions which grew at last intolerable--for I brooded when alone and magnified the evils of my position, turning morbid the while--that I wedded Mr. Timberlake. I never loved him; I took him to be a refuge rather than a husband, and my little life with him was not a happy one. By no fault of his, however; I think he loved me, and I know he did his best. I had nothing from him save kindness, and when he died in the Mediterranean I doubt not he carried into the other world a sincere regard for me.