"Dear Uncle Peter," the letter ran, "I am very, very homesick and lonely for you to-day. It seems to me that I would gladly give a whole year of my life just for the privilege of being with you, and talking instead of writing,--but since that can not be, I am going to try and write you about the thing that is troubling me. I can't bear it alone any longer, and still I don't know whether it is the kind of thing that it is honorable to tell or not. So you see I am very much troubled and puzzled, and this trouble involves some one else in a way that it is terrible to think of. "Uncle Peter, dear, I do not want to be married. Not until I have grown up, and seen something of the world. You know it is one of my dearest wishes to be self-supporting, not because I am a Feminist or a new woman, or have 'the unnatural belief of an antipathy to man' that you're always talking about, but just because it will prove to me once and for all that I belong to myself, and that my _soul_ isn't, and never has been cooperative. You know what I mean by this, and you are not hurt by my feeling so. You, I am sure, would not want me to be married, or to have to think of myself as engaged, especially not to anybody that we all knew and loved, and who is very close to me and you in quite another way. Please don't try to imagine what I mean, Uncle Peter--even if you know, you must tell yourself that you don't know. Please, please pretend even to yourself that I haven't written you this letter. I know people do tell things like this, but I don't know quite how they bring themselves to do it, even if they have somebody like you who understands everything--everything. "Uncle Peter, dear, I am supposed to be going to be married by and by when the one who wants it feels that it can be spoken of, and until that happens, I've got to wait for him to speak, unless I can find some way to tell him that I do not want it ever to be. I don't know how to tell him. I don't know how to make him feel that I do not belong to him. It is only myself I belong to, and I belong to you, but I don't know how to make that plain to any one who does not know it already. I can't say it unless perhaps you can help me to. "I am different from the other girls. I know every girl always thinks there is something different about her, but I think there are ways in which I truly am different. When I want anything I know more clearly what it is, and why I want it than most other girls do, and not only that, but I know now, that I want to keep myself, and everything I think and feel and am,--_sacred_. There is an inner shrine in a woman's soul that she must keep inviolate. I know that now.