She worked on through his letter, seriously answering an argument here, gaily deriding a point there, now displaying a hint of tenderness in some inquiry concerning his welfare, and again replying with vivacious but evasive sallies to personal remarks in which the lover seemed to overbalance the friend, until at last she came to the closing page. Then she laid down her pen and read it over again, realizing fully the enthusiasm, ambition and youthful energy which stirred and fed his devotion to this ideal of his section, and feeling also to the depths of her soul how completely it parted them. Her lips were trembling and her eyes dim with tears as she took up her pen again.
“I will not deny,” she wrote, “that the picture you draw of a South in which men and women would make the highest and finest kind of civilization, is very attractive to me. Or, rather, it would be if your beautiful social order were not rooted in the hideous slime of slavery. I cannot believe that it would endure, or that it would be anything but a curse to the world as long as beneath it were the groans, the chains, the unpaid toil and misery of so many thousands of other men and women unfortunate enough to have been born with black skins. It will never be possible for you to claim me as long as you are a part of such a system. But I hope you will always remember me as your truest friend, Rhoda Adeline Ware.”
She always signed her name thus in her letters to him, although she never used her middle name elsewhere, because it was a token of their mothers’ friendship and so it seemed to her to belong specially to their intercourse and to give to it a shy little fragrance of exclusion, of separateness from everything else.
But when she had finished she pushed it all aside and dropped her face on her arm and her whole body trembled with a long, deep sob. Her heart was answering the call of his, which she had heard and refused to heed, through every line of his letters. They were so far apart, their faces were set toward such hostile ideals! And yet across that deep gulf their spirits clamored and their bodies yearned for presence, for companionship, each for its mate. Through a blur of tears she took up her pen and groped for a fresh sheet of paper.
“Oh, Jeff, Jeff,” her pen was flying across the page, “how will it be possible to endure this separation longer? Surely it is wrong for people who love as we do to tear themselves apart like this. I cannot endure it, and yet I cannot consent. Come then, and carry me away in spite of myself.” Ah, it was a relief to give way to her feelings, to write the things she longed to say, even though she did not intend that he should ever read them. The pain in her face, the drawn look of mental suffering, began to fade out of it. “Tie my feet and my arms, if you must, so that I cannot run from you. Stop my lips with kisses, so that I cannot say I will not go. Take me in your arms and carry me away, anywhere, but do not let me deny our love any longer.”
It was the cry of the primitive woman, whose sane instinct for the strong mate lives on through all the thousand and one denials and perversions of civilization. From the days when courtship was seizure, and first choice belonged to the strongest, has the wish to be won in spite of herself lived on in the heart of woman. It has been buried deep and ever deeper beneath the accruing refinements of humanity, and forced to find dwarfed expression in the subterfuges with which the civilized woman evades and refuses her wooer, that finally she may make pretense of her unwilling capture. But now, from beneath the depths of a million years, it rose suddenly to the surface of a strong woman’s heart and overpowered all her strength.
Her hand was shaking and her bosom heaving as she put the sheet to one side. There was a knock at the door and Charlotte’s voice called out: “Rhoda! Please let me have some of your paper. I’ve used mine all up.”
Opening her door a mere crack she handed out paper and envelopes, for she had no wish to give her sister’s inquiring mind a chance to speculate upon the reason for her agitated countenance. But it was only a moment more, with a little resolute drawing in of her breath and a pressure of her lips, and a minute or two before the mirror, until her composure was restored. Then she heard her mother in the hall: “Come, Rhoda! Come, Charlotte! Dinner’s ready!”
“Yes, mother, in just a minute,” she called back. Jeff’s letters were quickly laid away in their box. Then she gathered up the sheets of her own letter and hurriedly folded them into the envelope, which she addressed and sealed. For after dinner she was going to a meeting of the anti-slavery sewing circle. The discarded sheets she twisted together and tossed into the fire.