n like you get their chance sooner or later, because you work,
and are ready to take the gifts of Fate when they appear and before
they pass. You will be always for climbing, if some woman does not drag
you back. That woman may be a wife, or it may be a loving and living
ghost of a wife like me. Ian, I could not bear to see what would come
at last--the disappointment in your face the look of hope gone from
your eyes; your struggle to climb, and the struggle of no avail.
Sisyphus had never such a task as you would have on the hill of life,
if I left all behind here and went with you. You would try to hide it;
but I would see you growing older hourly before my eyes. You would
smile--I wonder if you know what sort of wonderful, alluring thing your
smile is, Ian?--and that smile would drive me to kill myself, and so
hurt you still more. And so it is always an everlasting circle of
penalty and pain when you take the laws of life you get in the
mountains in your hands and break them in pieces on the rocks in the
valleys, and make new individual laws out of harmony with the general
necessity.

"Isn't it strange, Ian, that I who can do wrong so easily still know so
well and value so well what is right? It is my mother in me and my
grandfather in me, both of them fighting for possession. Let me empty
out my heart before you, because I know--I do not know why, but I do
know, as I write--that some dark cloud lowers, gathers round us, in
which we shall be lost, shall miss the touch of hand and never see each
other's face again. I know it, oh so surely! I did not really love you
years ago, before I married Rudyard; I did not love you when I married
him; I did not love him, I could not really love any one. My heart was
broken up in a thousand pieces to give away in little bits to all who
came. But I cared for you more than I cared for any one else--so much
more; because you were so able and powerful, and were meant to do such
big things; and I had just enough intelligence to want to understand
you; to feel what you were thinking, to grasp its meaning, however
dimly. Yet I have no real intellect. I am only quick and rather
clever--sharp, as Jigger would say, and with some cunning, too. I have
made so many people believe that I am brilliant. When I think and talk
and write, I only give out in a new light what others like you have
taught me; give out a loaf where you gave me a crumb; blow a drop of
water into a bushel of bubbles. No, I