"It has been terribly hard for me to write all this,but I had to do it,in order that you might understand the situation completely.Hugh dear,I simply can't leave him.This has been becoming clearer and clearer to me all these weeks,but it breaks my heart to have to write it.I have struggled against it,I have lain awake nights trying to find justification for going to you,but it is stronger than I.I am afraid of it--I suppose that's the truth.Even in those unforgettable days at the farm I was afraid of it,although I did not know what it was to be.
Call it what you like,say that I am weak.I am willing to acknowledge that it is weakness.I wish no credit for it,it gives me no glow,the thought of it makes my heart sick.I'm not big enough I suppose that's the real truth.I once might have been;but I'm not now,--the years of the life I chose have made a coward of me.It's not a question of morals or duty it's simply that I can't take the thing for which my soul craves.
It's too late.If I believed in prayer I'd pray that you might pity and forgive me.I really can't expect you to understand what I can't myself explain.Oh,I need pity--and I pity you,my dear.I can only hope that you will not suffer as I shall,that you will find relief away to work out your life.But I will not change my decision,I cannot change it.
Don't come on,don't attempt to see me now.I can't stand any more than I am standing,I should lose my mind."Here the letter was blotted,and some words scratched out.I was unable to reconstruct them.
"Ralph and I,"she proceeded irrelevantly,"have got Ham to agree to go to Buzzard's Bay,and we have taken a house near Wareham.Write and tell me that you forgive and pity me.I love you even more,if such a thing is possible,than I have ever loved you.This is my only comfort and compensation,that I have had and have been able to feel such a love,and I know I shall always feel it.--Nancy."The first effect of this letter was a paralyzing one.I was unable to realize or believe the thing that had happened to me,and I sat stupidly holding the sheet in my hand until I heard voices along the path,and then I fled instinctively,like an animal,to hide my injury from any persons I might meet.I wandered down the shore of the lake,striking at length into the woods,seeking some inviolable shelter;nor was I conscious of physical effort until I found myself panting near the crest of the ridge where there was a pasture,which some ancient glacier had strewn with great boulders.Beside one of these I sank.Heralded by the deep tones of bells,two steers appeared above the shoulder of a hill and stood staring at me with bovine curiosity,and fell to grazing again.A fleet of white clouds,like ships pressed with sail,hurried across the sky as though racing for some determined port;and the shadows they cast along the hillsides accentuated the high brightness of the day,emphasized the vivid and hateful beauty of the landscape.My numbness began to be penetrated by shooting pains,and I grasped little by little the fulness of my calamity,until I was in the state of wild rebellion of one whom life for the first time has foiled in a supreme desire.There was no fate about this thing,it was just an absurd accident.The operation of the laws of nature had sent a man to the ground:another combination of circumstances would have killed him,still another,and he would have arisen unhurt.
But because of this particular combination my happiness was ruined,and Nancy's!She had not expected me to understand.Well,I didn't understand,I had no pity,in that hour I felt a resentment almost amounting to hate;I could see only unreasoning superstition in the woman I wanted above everything in the world.Women of other days had indeed renounced great loves:the thing was not unheard of.But that this should happen in these times--and to me!It was unthinkable that Nancy of all women shouldn't be emancipated from the thralls of religious inhibition!And if it wasn't "conscience,"what was it?
Was it,as she said,weakness,lack of courage to take life when it was offered her?....I was suddenly filled with the fever of composing arguments to change a decision that appeared to me to be the result of a monstrous caprice and delusion;writing them out,as they occurred to me,in snatches on the backs of envelopes--her envelopes.
Then I proceeded to make the draft of a letter,the effort required for composition easing me until the draft was finished;when I started for the hotel,climbing fences,leaping streams,making my way across rock faces and through woods;halting now and then as some reenforcing argument occurred to me to write it into my draft at the proper place until the sheets were interlined and blurred and almost illegible.It was already three o'clock when I reached my room,and the mail left at four.I began to copy and revise my scrawl,glancing from time to time at my watch,which I had laid on the table.Hurriedly washing my face and brushing my hair,I arrived downstairs just as the stage was leaving....
After the letter had gone still other arguments I might have added began to occur to me,and I regretted that I had not softened some of the things I wrote and made others more emphatic.In places argument had degenerated into abject entreaty.Never had my desire been so importunate as now,when I was in continual terror of losing her.Nor could I see how I was to live without her,life lacking a motive being incomprehensible:yet the fire of optimism in me,though died down to ashes,would not be extinguished.At moments it flared up into what almost amounted to a conviction that she could not resist my appeal.Ihad threatened to go to her,and more than once I started packing....
