I knew in that moment the rest of a fearful struggle of the brain—the poor weak brain of a woman—that swept the world, though, beneath her feet.
There was grief in that family, when I became in that decision myself, and stood a stranger among them; when the social fabric, his children, their father, false pride, conventional position—all had overthrow; when my mother’s wrongs had revenge, and my father’s love had justification, in the child of his life-wronged wife!
But their grief was joy to the agony of calm in which I made that decision.
Not a tear came to my eye when I told it them; not a pulse stirred in my breast. How inconceivable to them all this agony.
My husband was even still solicitous to preserve the form of a union, now no longer possible in reality. One of those formality doctors of the soul was sent for—his uncle Francis. O! after all the agony I had passed through, I might have been spared the sight of one of those whose words had sanctioned and stamped upon me, as if by the authority of God, all this misery.
But how weak and idle to me were his words about theological sin and social infamy. They fell on my ear, in constant repetition, meaningless as the dropping of the beads of a rosary.
He told me I was imperiling my soul, and he left me with some formal expression of pious horror, when I told him I would willingly incur that risk.
And now I was alone in the world—my life still before me—severed from every living relation—to be lived or ended. What new connections must I assume? Unsupported, helpless, alone, where should I go? What must I do?
In those past ages the convent doors would have been open to me; but my intelligence, the intelligence of the very age in which I lived, forbade me the immolation of my living body and my free soul.