All my life my temper has been a whirlwind that rose and carried me to the limit of things, and then beyond, without any warning. I thought I was making a confession in a state of religious zeal, but I am afraid it was just the same old rage. Religious zeal often takes these peculiar forms of exaggerated temper, and often never finds itself out. From this you’ll see I’m trying very hard to differentiate myself; but it is difficult. Then for minutes and minutes, and perhaps hours, I sat there in the dark beside that strange man, and told him things that I had never told anybody living, and some I had never admitted to myself. It came out in a wailing, sobbing volume, and I trembled so that he had to take my cold hand in his, I suppose to keep me from sliding off the rock down into the valley. I wonder if any woman before ever talked out her whole wild self into a man’s ears? And I wonder if it shook him as it did this one out under the lowering clouds and dark trees? When women habitually reveal themselves to men, it is going to bring social revolution, and they must go slow. And I did go slow. I tried to be truly considerate of him. I began on a few ridiculous misdemeanors that I am surprised I remembered of myself, such as inconsiderate extraction of money from father by means of unwarranted tantrums, impositions on my dear mother’s loving credulity about some of my hunting forays with Bobby, when I left home riding Lady Gray, side-style, only to fling a leg over Dudley’s Grit two squares down the street, where Bobby was waiting with him for me. It surprised me that he only chuckled delightedly, and wanted to know just exactly who and what Bobby was or is. But I couldn’t be diverted, and was determined to tell the whole tale. I felt as if I must get one or two things off my conscience and on to his. I went the whole length, and succeeded. When I told him of that mad escapade at Louisville, while I was visiting Aunt Grace, with Stanley Hughes and the supper party he gave to that French dancing-girl in “The Bird-Flight,” when I got out of the taxi and walked home in my satin slippers in the snow for ten blocks rather than stay and have Stanley take me another block in the state he was in, though I had done nothing to stop his drinking and laughed at him, I heard him catch his breath and shudder. I never told anybody before that it was a paper-knife in my hands that ripped open Henry Hedrick’s cheek for an inch, down in his library while Mamie was up-stairs putting their six-months’ old baby to bed, and I was a guest in their house. In this case I had suspected how he felt about me before I came, but had contemptuously ignored it because I liked to be with Mamie. I told the last few minutes of that tale with dry sobs breaking my words, and while I shook, he folded my cold hand in both his warm ones, and I heard him mutter between his teeth: “God love her and keep her!”