drafts she succeeded in evolving this:

"DEAR MR. MANNING,--I find it very difficult to answer your letter.
I hope you won't mind if I say first that I think it does me an
extraordinary honor that you should think of any one like myself
so highly and seriously, and, secondly, that I wish it had not been
written."

She surveyed this sentence for some time before going on. "I wonder,"
she said, "why one writes him sentences like that? It'll have to go,"
she decided, "I've written too many already." She went on, with a
desperate attempt to be easy and colloquial:

"You see, we were rather good friends, I thought, and now perhaps it
will be difficult for us to get back to the old friendly footing. But if
that can possibly be done I want it to be done. You see, the plain fact
of the case is that I think I am too young and ignorant for marriage.
I have been thinking these things over lately, and it seems to me that
marriage for a girl is just the supremest thing in life. It isn't just
one among a number of important things; for her it is the important
thing, and until she knows far more than I know of the facts of life,
how is she to undertake it? So please; if you will, forget that you
wrote that letter, and forgive this answer. I want you to think of me
just as if I was a man, and quite outside marriage altogether.

"I do hope you will be able to do this, because I value men friends.
I shall be very sorry if I cannot have you for a friend. I think that
there is no better friend for a girl than a man rather older than
herself.

"Perhaps by this time you will have heard of the step I have taken in
leaving my home. Very likely you will disapprove highly of what I have
done--I wonder? You may, perhaps, think I have done it just in a fit of
childish petulance because my father locked me in when I wanted to go
to a ball of which he did not approve. But really it is much more
than that. At Morningside Park I feel as though all my growing up was
presently to stop, as though I was being shut in from the light of life,
and, as they say in botany, etiolated. I was just like a sort of dummy
that does things as it is told--that is to say, as the strings are
pulled. I want to be a person by myself, and to pull my own strings. I
had rather have trouble and hardship like that than be taken care of by
others. I want to be myself. I wonder if a man can quite understand that
passionate feeling? It is quite a passionate feeling. So I am