“My Dear Jim,” she began, after much hesitation, and with many long and thoughtful pauses as she wrote, “it will surprise you, I know, but I have decided to go back to Oxford—to the Oxford I have so often told you about. Do not think it is only cruelty on my part, or cowardice, or self-interest. I have thought over everything long and carefully. And it has led, always led, to one end—that end is: neither you nor I must go on leading the lives we have been leading! It will hurt me, and it will hurt you, I believe, to break the ties that time has made. But there is, today, all the width of the Atlantic between us—and it is there, I think, that I am the coward. For it is only this that makes it possible for me to do what I’m doing. With you, I would bend to your will; here it will be easier. Now, above all things, both you and I must learn not to look on ourselves as beings apart from the rest of the world. If we have ever been enemies of society we must learn not to remember it—for it is this feeling, I know, which holds the key of our undoing. I have often wondered and looked to see in what ways I reproduced the atavistic conditions of the primitive woman—for they say that we evil doers are only echoes out of the past—but I’m going to do it no more. We are both of us ill-fitted for the things and the deeds we have drifted into. They make us suffer too much. It is work that should fall to souls dwarfed and stunted and benumbed. We are not morbid and depraved and blind; we have intelligence and feeling. We have only been unhappy and unlucky, let’s say. So now we must fight along and wait for better luck, as you used to put it. We are not what they call ‘recidivists.’ We are not abnormal and branded; we must fight away the deadly feeling that we are detached from the rest of the world, that mankind is organized and fighting against us, that we are the hunted, and all men the hounds! What we have done, we have done. But I know that we were both initiated into wrong-doing so quietly and so insidiously that the current caught us before we knew it. Yet I feel that I have none of the traits of the Female Offender, though in my anxiety and crazy search for causes and excuses I have even taken my cephalic index and tested my chromatic perception and my tactile sensitiveness and made sure that I responded normally to a Faraday current! Yes, we are both too normal to succeed happily in the ways we began. . . . I shall miss you, but I shall always love you. Oh, Jim, pray for me; as I, daily, shall pray for you! I can’t write more now. Go back to your work, though it means being hungry and lonely and unhappy, fight out the problem of your amplifier, and struggle along with your transmitting camera, until you accomplish something we can both take pride in and be happy over! Sometime, later, when I write, I shall be able to explain everything more fully. . . . I was eleven days in the hospital, and crossed on the _Nieuw Amsterdam_.