You see, I am trying to be brutally frank. I am trying to empty my mind out to you, and a bit of my heart. I like you a lot, big man. I don't mind making that confession. If you were not a preacher—if you did not see life through such narrow eyes, if you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting yourself in the other fellow's shoes now and then, if only your creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital—I—but those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.
It's no use, preacher man. That day you kissed me on the creek bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of loving you—but it was under protest—under pretty much the same protest with which you care for me. You were both times carried away so by your own passion that for the moment your mental reservations were in abeyance. And although perhaps a breath of that same passion stirred me—I can admit it now when the distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your hands—yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering: "Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."
There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me. But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate protection—as he has often made plain—to think, to know why I do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of good and evil, of right and wrong—I what I am, a creature craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it. I wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in that sort of atmosphere.
Even if you were not a minister—if you were just plain man—and I wish you were—I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures (vide Havelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology of sex among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I know myself, within certain limits—but men I do not know at all, except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimately—and that alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more protective passion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you—and mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours, and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash, until we should hate each other.
And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for awhile as if I'd lost something. I have felt that way these weeks that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me. I have felt it more keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don't know where you may have gone, nor if you will ever come back. I find myself wondering how you will fare in this grim country. You're such a visionary. You're so impractical. And neither nature nor society is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable.
Do you understand what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity. I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow very strong if I let myself go.
I can see you scowl. You will say to yourself—looking at it from your own peculiar angle—you will say: "She is not worth thinking about." And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you say it. Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you, just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought and act that I could not endure, still—knowing all this—I feel a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you—and that is often.
I shall change, of course. So will you. Psychologically, love doesn't endure to death—unless it is nurtured by association, unless it has its foundation in community of interest and effort, a mutual affection that can survive hard knocks.
Good-by, dear freckled man. You have taught me something. I hope I have done as much for you. I'm sorry it couldn't be different. But—a man must be able to stand on his own feet, eh? I leave you to puzzle out what "standing on his own feet" means. Good-by.
Sophie.