nd; but down beneath
all, the woman in me, the everlasting woman, is sure there is no such
world.

"Listen, dear child--I call you that, for though I am only twenty-five
I seem as aged as the Sphinx, and, like the Sphinx that begets mockery,
so my soul, which seems to have looked out over unnumbered centuries,
mocks at this world which you would make for you and me. Listen, Ian.
It is not a real world, and I should not--and that is the pitiful,
miserable part of it--I should not make you happy, if I were in that
world with you. To my dire regret I know it. Suddenly you have roused
in me what I can honestly say I have never felt before--strange,
reckless, hungry feelings. I am like some young dweller of the jungle
which, cut off from its kind tries, with a passion that eats and eats
and eats away his very flesh to get back to its kind, to his mate, to
that other wild child of nature which waits for the one appeasement of
primeval desire.

"Ian, I must tell you the whole truth about myself as I understand it.
I am a hopeless, painful contradiction; I have always been so. I have
always wanted to be good, but something has always driven me where the
flowers have a poisonous sweetness, where the heart grows bad. I want
to cry to you, Ian, to help me to be good; and yet something drives me
on to want to share with you the fruit which turns to dust and ashes in
the long end. And behind all that again, some tiny little grain of
honour in me says that I must not ask you to help me; says that I ought
never to look into your eyes again, never touch your hand, nor see you
any more; and from the little grain of honour comes the solemn whisper,
'Do not ruin him; do not spoil his life.'

"Your letter has torn my heart, so that it can never again be as it was
before, and because there is some big, noble thing in you, some little,
not ignoble thing is born in me. Ian, you could never know the
anguished desire I have to be with you always, but, if I keep sane at
all, I will not go--no, I will not go with you, unless the madness
carries me away. It would kill you. I know, because I have lived so
many thousands of years. My spirit and my body might be satisfied, the
glory in having you all my own would be so great; but there would be no
joy for you. To men like you, work is as the breath of life. You must
always be fighting for something, always climbing higher, because you
see some big thing to do which is so far above you.

"Yes, me