h presses upon me--which has driven me like a
slave. At times I feel certain that the last message of Judge Colfax,
rather than the danger of which it intended to warn me, has been my
menace.

At first I recalled the fact of my birth and inheritance with resentment
and courage.

"I am myself," I have exclaimed. "I alone am responsible for my life, my
thoughts, my actions. They shall be according to my will to make them."

Then the haunting doubt would oppose itself to my claim. It spoke to me
like a person.

"No," it said. "You are not yourself. You are the victim of fixed laws.
The zebra is striped rather than spotted because its forebears wore
stripes. So with you. You are half murderess and half gutter-snipe. You
are woven according to the pattern. You are moulded according to the
mould. You are a prisoner of heredity. Deceive yourself if you will for
a time, but sooner or later you, like those from whom you came and of
whom you are a part, will be the plaything of self-indulgence and
weakness and passion. Fate has made your image that you see in the
mirror, refined and comely so that you may see the better the work of
heredity when it asserts itself."

This voice was ever at my ear. It became a personal voice. I thought at
first that it was the voice of some other being. At last I came by slow
changes to the belief that it was not a voice outside of me. It was my
Self that spoke. It was the heritage of evil within me. The thing that
whispered to me with its condemning voice, frightening away my courage
and sapping my strength of will, was my own blood!

I began to watch for the outcropping of evil in my conduct--for the
moment when the force of heredity within me would make itself known to
you and to the world. No morning dawned that I did not ask myself if
night would fall without some opening of the gates of my character
behind which so much that was evil, I believed, was clamoring to escape.
I lived in two lives. In one I was your wife and the girl you had
known, who now existed like an automaton, going senselessly through the
acts of day to day existence. In the other I was a condemned victim,
waiting in apprehension for the call of terrible and evil authority.

It was an accident which, at last, made real my fancies.

You remember that I was thrown from a horse. You remember that for days
a torn nerve in my elbow gave me excruciating pain. You remember that,
having regained my senses after the setting