“I must tell you something, Will. Come with me somewhere—where we can be alone. I must tell you something.”
She moved off, away from the house, he keeping beside her. They passed out of the garden, into the deep shade of the park.
“Do you remember,” she began, all at once, “do you remember what I said yesterday, about my motto? That my motto was ’Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold’.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I am going to be very bold indeed now, Will. I am going to tell you something—something that will make you hate me perhaps—that will make you despise me perhaps,” she faltered.
“You could not possibly tell me anything that could make me hate you or despise you. But you must not tell me anything at all, unless it is something you are perfectly sure you will be happier for having told me,” he said.
“It is something I wish to tell you, something I must tell you,” said she. Then after a little pause, “Oh, how shall I begin it?” But before he could have spoken, “Do you think that a woman—do you think that a girl, when she is very young, when she is very immature and impressionable, and very impulsive, and ignorant, and when she is alone in the world, without a father or mother—do you think that if she makes some terrible mistake, if she is terribly deceived, if somebody whom she believes to be good and noble and unhappy and misunderstood, somebody whom she—whom she loves—do you think that if she makes some terrible mistake—if she—if she—oh, my God!—if——-” She held her breath for a second, then suddenly, “Can’t you understand what I mean?” she broke down in a sort of wail, and hid her face in her hands, and sobbed.
Will stood beside her, holding his arms out towards her. “Johannah! Johannah!” was all he could say.
She dropped her hands, and looked at him with great painful eyes. “Tell me—do you think that a woman can never be forgiven? Do you think that she is soiled, degraded, changed utterly? Do you think that when she—that when she did what she did—it was a sin, a crime, not only a terrible mistake, and that her whole nature is changed? Most people think so. They think that a mark has been left upon her, branded upon her; that she can never, never be the same again. Do you think so, Will? Oh, it is not true; I know it is not true. A woman can leave that mistake, that terror, that horror—she can leave it behind her as completely as she can leave any other dreadful thing. She can blot it out of her life, like a nightmare. She isn’t changed—she remains the same woman. She isn’t utterly changed, and soiled, and defiled. In her own conscience, no matter what other people think, she knows, she knows she isn’t. When she wakes up to find that the man she had believed in, the man she had loved, when she wakes up to find that he isn’t in any way what she had thought him, that he is base and evil and ignoble, and when all her love for him dies in horror and misery—oh, do you think that she must never, never, as long as she lives, hold up her head again, never be happy again, never love any one again? Look at me, Will. I am myself. I am what God made me. Do you think that I am utterly vile because—because———” But her voice failed again, and her eyes again filled with tears.
“Oh, Johannah, don’t ask me what I think of you. I could not tell you what I think of you. You are as God made you. God never made—never made any one else so splendid.”