s worth that sacrifice? A convent and
self-quenching;--cloisters would seem to me like holy dew. But that
would be sleep, and I feel the powers of life. Never have I felt them
so mightily. If it were not for being called on to act and mew, I would
stay, fight, meet a bayonet-hedge of charges and rebut them. I have my
natural weapons and my cause. It must be confessed that I have also more
knowledge of men and the secret contempt--it must be--the best of them
entertain for us. Oh! and we confirm it if we trust them. But they have
been at a wicked school.

'I will write. From whatever place, you shall have letters, and
constant. I write no more now. In my present mood I find no alternative
between rageing and drivelling. I am henceforth dead to the world. Never
dead to Emma till my breath is gone--poor flame! I blow at a bed-room
candle, by which I write in a brown fog, and behold what I am--though
not even serving to write such a tangled scrawl as this. I am of no
mortal service. In two days I shall be out of England. Within a week
you shall hear where. I long for your heart on mine, your dear eyes. You
have faith in me, and I fly from you!--I must be mad. Yet I feel calmly
reasonable. I know that this is the thing to do. Some years hence a grey
woman may return, to hear of a butterfly Diana, that had her day and
disappeared. Better than a mewing and courtseying simulacrum of the
woman--I drivel again. Adieu. I suppose I am not liable to capture and
imprisonment until the day when my name is cited to appear. I have left
London. This letter and I quit the scene by different routes--I would
they were one. My beloved! I have an ache--I think I am wronging you. I
am not mistress of myself, and do as something within me, wiser, than
I, dictates.--You will write kindly. Write your whole heart. It is not
compassion I want, I want you. I can bear stripes from you. Let me hear
Emma's voice--the true voice. This running away merits your reproaches.
It will look like--. I have more to confess: the tigress in me wishes
it were! I should then have a reckless passion to fold me about, and the
glory infernal, if you name it so, and so it would be--of suffering
for and with some one else. As it is, I am utterly solitary, sustained
neither from above nor below, except within myself, and that is all
fire and smoke, like their new engines.--I kiss this miserable sheet of
paper. Yes, I judge that I have run off a line--and what a line! which