And this love, what is it? It is a power present always in the world, which, recognized by two like natures, thenceforth binds them to each other, beyond the control, and in violation, if need be, of any other law—as my mother’s love bound her to my father, and my father’s love bound him to her, and gave me my being—a being cradled in the tenderest, truest passion that ever existed between two human beings.
How long have I been in ascertaining and yielding myself up to this divine law! What wasted years! What subjections derogatory to the vilest nature! What hypocrisy, dishonoring to God! What suffering have I caused this man, assigned to me alone, since that day on which I first in him recognized myself!
It seems so long ago; it seems far longer to me than the time makes it; it seems as if an eternity had rolled backward to that day.
Oh, I had questionings of right and wrong in that fathomless interval of despair, far other, far deeper, than all I had been taught or could be taught by their lips—questionings that brought me to the very brink of death.
Why should I have loved him? Why do I love him? What is it I love in him? All this I have asked myself a thousand times, and there has never been, can never be, an answer to all this questioning.
Yet I say now to you: Why should I not love him? What is there not to love in him? My heart only answers: What is there in me that I should be loved, that I should know that joy which in its tiniest moment makes all years of other time a mockery?
And these questions do we ask each other daily and nightly forever.
And yet there is one reason, they say, why I should not have loved him—one word there is which the world places as an impassable barrier between us—a word that has never crossed my lips till now—a meaningless word, and yet involving in their eyes a crime as great as that adultery which I commit—just as great, for both are equally meaningless as touching our relation.
And that word expresses the social position he bore me. Rather than have been his lawful wife even, I might have been a king’s mistress, or any nobleman’s paramour, with less offence.
And I, who was the reputable bawd of marriage rites, was I above him? I, a daily offence against decency in obedience to the same social law that would have forced him to life-long humility? Was I above him? How? In what way? I, sunk, in the abasement of my own weak unnatural compliance, below the veriest nameless outcast? Could I be above anything? Was he not at least my peer? He, who, if we leave too such vapid questions of distinction, is Hyperion to a Satyr compared in person with me—short, fat, little body that I am!