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I wear myself out at the dispensary for poor French children and try my best to smile and be cheerful and to interest myself in their pitiful needs and sorrows; but my heart is not in this work and my smiles are forced. Many nights I cry myself to sleep.
And yet I did right. I go over it all in my mind and I see that I did right. There was nothing else for me to do. I had to decide for both of us, and I decided. I thought of those dreadful things that I did, and—meant to do—those things that neither Christopher nor I can possibly forget ... how could Christopher ever have confidence in me as his wife? How could we ever be happy together with those memories between us?
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I try to remember the exact words that I wrote to my lover that morning when I went away. I hope I did not make him suffer too much. But of course he suffered—he must have. I told him we could not see each other any more, or write to each other, or—anything. I knew I would have been too weak to resist the call of my love and he would have been too fine, too chivalrous, to let me go. He would have said: “You are cured now, dear” (which I really am) “and there is no reason why we should not be married—” which is true, except that he would always have had the fear, deep down in his heart, that I might relapse into what I had been. How could a high-minded man like Chris bear the thought that the woman he loved, the woman who was to be the mother of his children, had acted like a wanton? He could not bear it. It is evident that I did right.
And yet—
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I often wonder what another woman would have done in my place. She loves a man as I loved Christopher—as I love him still. She is proud, she has always been admired, she cannot bear the thought of being pitied. And suddenly she learns that she has disgraced herself, she has violated the sacred traditions of modesty that restrain all women. She has acted like an abandoned woman towards the man she worships. God! It is true she has done this without knowing it, without being responsible for it, but she has done it, and that ineffaceable memory will always shame her, if she becomes his wife. Day after day she will read it in his eyes, in his reticencies, in his efforts to be cheerful—she will know that he remembers—what she was!
NO! She could not bear it, no woman with any pride could bear it.
Pride!