I am so far to blame that I abandoned her at a moment when it might still have been possible to save her.... But this is a morbid notion! If a person wants "to shuffle off this mortal coil" it is nobody's duty to prevent her.
To me, Agatha Ussing's life or death are secondary matters; it is only the circumstances that trouble me.
Was she mad, or no? Undoubtedly not more insane than the rest of us, but her self-control snapped like a bowstring which is overstrained. She saw—so she said—a grinning death's head behind every smiling face. Merely a bee in her bonnet! But she was foolish enough to talk about it; and when people laughed at her words with a good-natured contempt, her glance became searching and fixed as though she was trying to convince herself. Such an awful look of terror haunted her eyes, that at her gaze a cold shiver, born of one's own fears and forebodings, ran through one.
She compelled us to realise the things we scarcely dare foresee....
I shall never forget a letter in which she wrote these words in a queer, faltering handwriting:
"If men suspected what took place in a woman's inner life after forty, they would avoid us like the plague, or knock us on the head like mad dogs."
Such a philosophy of life ended in the poor woman being shut up in a madhouse. She ought to have kept it to herself instead of posting it up on the walls of her house. It was quite sufficient as a proof of her insanity.
I cannot think what induced me to visit her in the asylum. Not pure pity. I was prompted rather by that kind of painful curiosity which makes a patient ask to see a limb which has just been amputated. I wanted to look with my own eyes into that shadowy future which Agatha had reached before me.
What did I discover? She had never cared for her husband; on the contrary she had betrayed him with an effrontery that would hardly have been tolerated outside the smart world; yet now she suffered the torments of hell from jealousy of her husband. Not of her lovers; their day was over; but of him, because he was the one man she saw. Also because she bore his name and was therefore bound to him.
On every other subject she was perfectly sane. When we were left alone together she said: "The worst of it is that I know my 'madness' will only be temporary. It is a malady incident to my age. One day it will pass away. One day I shall have got through the inevitable phase. But how does that help me now?"