“I have gone over every word of our conversation that evening in the garden a thousand times; we were planning to come to Chicago for his medical course, and I had expressed my exultant confidence in him to withstand whatever temptation a city might offer, my pride in his purity of thought, his rectitude of conduct. It was then he rose rather abruptly and went into the house to write the letter to me which I found on his table next morning. In that letter he told me that he was too vile to live any longer, that he had sinned not only against his own code of decency and honor, but against my lifelong standards and teachings, and that he realized perfectly that I could never forgive him. He evidently did not expect any understanding from me, either for himself or for ‘the young and innocent girl’ about to become the mother of his child, and in his interpretation of my rigid morals he was quite sure that I would never consent to see her, but he wrote me that he had told her to send the little baby to me as soon as it was born, obviously hoping that I might be tender to the innocent, although I was so harsh and unpitying to the guilty. I had apparently never given him a glimpse beyond my unbending sternness, and he had all unwittingly pronounced me too self-righteous for forgiveness; at any rate, he faced death rather than my cold disapprobation. “The girl is still leading the life she had led for two years before my son met her. She is glad to have her child cared for and hopes that I will make him my heir, but understands, of course, that his paternity could never be established in court. So here I am, old and hard, beginning again the perilous experiment of rearing a man child. I suppose it was inevitable that I should hold the girl responsible for my son’s downfall and for his death. She was one of the wretched young women who live in college towns for the express purpose of inveigling young men, often deliberately directing their efforts toward those who are reputed to have money. I discovered all sorts of damaging facts about her, which enabled me to exonerate my son from intentional wrong-doing, and to think quite honestly that he had been lured and tempted beyond his strength. The girl was obliged to leave the little town, which was filled with the horror and scandal of the occurrence, but even then, in that first unbridled public censure against the ‘bad woman’ who had been discovered in the midst of virtuous surroundings, there was a tendency to hold me accountable for my son’s death, whatever the girl’s earlier responsibility may have been.