It opens with a calm and somewhat artificial quarrel with the superscription of his letter, but soon breaks out into strong reproach for his talk of death. ‘How hast thou been able to frame such thoughts, dearest?’ she asks; ‘how hast thou found words to convey them?’ ‘Spare me, beloved,’ she says again: ‘talk not of death until the dread angel comes near.’ Moreover, she and her nuns would be too distracted with grief to pray over his corpse. Seneca and Lucan are quoted to support her. Indeed she soon lapses into words which the theologian would call blasphemous. She turns her face to the heavens with that old, old cry, Where is Thy boasted justice? They were untouched in the days of their sinful joy, but smitten with a thousand sorrows as soon as their bed had the sacramental blessing. ‘Oh, if I dared but call God cruel to me! Oh, most wretched of all creatures that I am!’ Women have ever been the ruin of men—Adam, Solomon, Samson, Job—she runs through the long category of man’s sneaking accusations. She wishes she could make satisfaction to God for her sin, but, ‘if I must confess the true infirmity of my wretched soul, how can I appease Him, when I am always accusing Him of the deepest cruelty for this affliction?’ There is yet a further depth that she must lay bare to her father confessor and her spouse. How can there be question of penance ‘when the mind still retains the thought of sinning, and is inflamed again with the old longing? So sweet did I find the pleasures of our loving days, that I cannot bring myself to reject them, nor banish them from my memory. Wheresoever I go they thrust themselves upon my vision, and enkindle the old desire. Even when I sleep they torment me with their fancied joy. Even during the Mass, when our prayer should be purest, the dreadful vision of those pleasures so haunts my soul that I am rather taken up with them than with prayer. I ought to be lamenting what I have done; I am rather lamenting what I miss. Not only our actions, but the places and the times are so bound up with the thought of thee in my mind, that night and day I am repeating all with thee in spirit. The movement of body reveals my thoughts at times; they are betrayed in unguarded speech. Oh, woe is me!... Not knowing my hypocrisy, people call me “chaste.” They deem bodily integrity a virtue, whereas virtue resides in the mind, not the body.’ Moreover, virtue should be practised out of love for God, whereas ‘God knows that in every part of my life I have more dread of offending thee than Him; I have a greater desire to please thee than Him.’ Let him not deceive himself with trust in _her_ prayers, but rather help her to overcome herself. And the poor woman, the nobility of her soul hidden from her and crushed under the appalling ethical ignorance and perverse ordering of her times, ends with a plaintive hope that she may yet, in spite of all, find some corner in heaven that will save her from the abyss.