ere she
well and strong, I would take matters in my own hands and make the
break. Surely I could do something! I had no earning capacity, but
other women had made their way, and I could make mine. If she were
perfectly well--

But she was not well. Through those first hours, and through most of
the hours of the night that followed, the knowledge of the insidious
disease that was hers was the high, hard wall against which I struck
at every turn of thought, at every possibility at which I grasped,
and in the dawn of a new day I knew I must not go away.

It was not easy to surrender. Always my two selves are fighting and
I wanted much to know more of life than I could know in the costly
shelter, controlled by custom and convention, wherein I lived. I had
long been looking through stained glass. I was restless to get out
and see clearly, to know all sorts of people, all conditions of life,
and the chance had seemed within my grasp--and now it must be given
up.

There are times when I am heedless of results, when I am daring and
audacious and count no cost, but that is only where I alone am
concerned. When it comes to making decisions which affect others I
am a coward. I lack the courage to have my own way at the expense of
some one else; and though through the night I protested stormily, if
inwardly, that I was not meant for gilded cages, but for contact, for
encounter, I knew I should yield in the end.

The next day I told her I would not go away. She said nothing save
she hardly thought I had entirely lost my senses, but the thing I am
gladdest to remember since her death is the look that came into her
eyes when I told her. For two years longer I lived with her, years
for her of practical invalidism, and for me of opportunity to do for
her what she had never permitted me to do before. Two weeks after
Kitty's marriage she died suddenly, and at times I still shiver with
the cold clamminess that came over me as I stood by her in her last
sleep and realized my aloneness in the world. My parents had died in
my early childhood. I had no brothers or sisters, no near relatives,
save an uncle who lived abroad and some cousins here in town. Mr.
Chesmond was very kind, but I could not continue to accept what he
had willingly given his wife's adopted child, and Kitty no longer
needed me. It is a fearful feeling, this sense of belonging to no
one, of having no one belonging to you. Lest it overwhelm me, I went
a