Thus began for us both a period of twenty-five years, during which we passed eight or nine hours out of the twenty-four in each other's company—except on a few rare occasions, when illness or some other cause prevented one of us from sleeping at the proper time.
Mary! Mary!
I idolized her while she lived; I idolize her memory.
For her sake all women are sacred to me, even the lowest and most depraved and God-forsaken. They always found a helping friend in her.
How can I pay a fitting tribute to one so near to me—nearer than any woman can ever have been to any man?
I know her mind as I know my own! No two human souls can ever have interpenetrated each other as ours have done, or we should have heard of it. Every thought she ever had from her childhood to her death has been revealed—every thought of mine! Living as we did, it was inevitable. The touch of a finger was enough to establish the strange circuit, and wake a common consciousness of past and present, either hers or mine.
And oh, how thankful am I that some lucky chance has preserved me, murderer and convict as I am, from anything she would have found it impossible to condone!
I try not to think that shyness and poverty, ungainliness and social imbecility combined, have had as much to do as self-restraint and self-respect in keeping me out of so many pitfalls that have been fatal to so many men better and more gifted than myself.
I try to think that her extraordinary affection, the chance result of a persistent impression received in childhood, has followed me through life without my knowing it, and in some occult, mysterious way has kept me from thoughts and deeds that would have rendered me unworthy, even in her too indulgent eyes.
Who knows but that her sweet mother's farewell kiss and blessing, and the tender tears she shed over me when I bade her good-bye at the avenue gate so many years ago, may have had an antiseptic charm? Mary! I have followed her from her sickly, suffering childhood to her girlhood—from her half-ripe, gracefully lanky girlhood to the day of her retirement from the world of which she was so great an ornament. From girl to woman it seems like a triumphal procession through all the courts of Europe—scenes the like of which I have never even dreamed—flattery and strife to have turned the head of any princess! And she was the simple daughter of a working scientist and physician—the granddaughter of a fiddler.