? My own experience teaches me that there is more
facility in resistance. Acting thus I have always felt in accord with
natural instincts, and there is a barbaric sense of security in following
them.... Yet I have only one thing to tell you in reply to your "so many."
Can you guess what it is? Already I think the birds know it. I have so far
departed from my natural order of perversity and self-protection that they
feel it, and twitter together when I pass by. I think they look down upon
me now with high-feathered contempt. Could anything be more mortifying?

Do not laugh, Philip! You have behaved little better than a robber in this
matter. I have lost to you, but the game was not fair; dear mendicant, you
played with a card up your sleeve! All my life I have planned to outwit
predestination. I have ignored Sabbath-day doctrines and faith-binding
dogmas to this end. I could even have held out indefinitely against your
"foreknowledge," but when you come, heralded by an unexpected misfortune,
asking "peace" of me that you may meet your own difficulties with a
steadier courage, I find you invincible. It is as if you had suddenly
slipped through the door of my heart and left will, betrayed, on guard
outside. I have no defence in my nature against your plea. The diplomacy
of your need takes me unawares, and, no matter how I fear the future, now
I am bound to add myself to you in love and hope. The prospect is terrible
and sweet. Already it has made me a stranger in my father's house, a
foreigner among the trees, and a wakeful, frightened mystery to myself. I
am full of tears and secresy. I am no longer Jessica, the wind-souled
dryad of the forest, but merely a woman in definition, facing a new world
of pain and joy. Oh, my beloved! you have taken all that I have, all that
I am! Henceforth I shall be only a part of you,--a little hyperbole of
domesticity always following after, or advancing to meet you.... Dear gods
of the world, defend me from such a fate! ... After all, I cannot admit
the "one thing." I cannot submit to this annihilation, this absorption of
character and personality. If you take me, you do so at your own risk, I
will not promise "peace," but confusion rather. But if you get me, you
must take me. Yet, if you come to Morningtown after me, I will deny my
love, not out of perversity, but out of fear. The sight of you is a signal
for me to take refuge upon my tallest bough. And I can no more come down
to you than