“‘You love my person; you worship the _animal_ in me. If you love not my mind, my heart and soul more, and feel not more reverence and worship for the God in me than for the animal, if I am unworthy and unable to meet the wants of your intellectual and spiritual nature, PERISH ALL OUTWARD BONDS! Tell me, have I no power to hold you by any bonds but the sensualistic? Has my soul no power over you? If this be so, let me no longer seek to hold you at all. It crushes me, and overwhelms me with conscious degradation, to feel that I have no power over your intellectual and moral nature; that you come to me, caress me, and call me WIFE, only that I may administer to your sensual pleasure, and that you have no fond regard and loving adoration for me, except for my mere outward, physical womanhood. I cannot live so, feeling that your presence and caresses are ever to be but a prelude to the surrender of my person to your animal passion. “‘I know I have powers of soul, which, if suffered to be developed, without this horrible crucifixion, might bless you. I will not yet believe you will turn a deaf ear to this appeal of your wife, who, as you know, has had, and can have, no life apart from you. I pray, with tears, that you will spare me from a maternity which my soul repudiates, and whose sufferings I cannot endure. You will not deny me this privilege, which, more than anything else, I ask of you. “‘Though much guilt is on my soul, through repeated efforts to get rid of the results of your passional relations with me, and save myself from the pain and anguish of a maternity I have felt unable to bear, and of giving birth to children that I do not want, yet I will not despair of salvation reaching me through your love. To live as pure as my aspirations are, and have my life the natural outgrowth of the deep love which I feel and must express or die, would bring us both nearer heaven. “‘I cannot consent to have the woman, _the real soul-and-spirit woman_ in me, obliterated. I cannot believe it is my destiny to have the _woman_ expunged from my nature. I want to be a strong, pure woman. I want to be lovely to you. Yet, heretofore, the strongest manifestations of love to you have, usually, had little other effect than to arouse your animal nature, and thus have been so turned as to render me unlovely; for a wife must become unlovely and repulsive to her husband, the moment he ceases to reverence her soul, and feels that she is to him but the means of mere sensual gratification.