hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
confidence, and left me--the most upset and distressed little person
on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. "Drifted" is the
right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest
in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
misery--what empty names sin and misery then were to me! "You will
have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
anything else," was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.

In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been