"
A long silence followed. She spoke at last, checking her tears:
"And so this is the end of my dream! This is what life has brought
me to! And what have I done to deserve it? To leave home, to shun
friends, to dread scandal, to be misjudged, to bear the burden of
your secret and share with you its shame, to see my years stretch
out before me with no love in them, no ambitions, no ties--this is
what life has brought me, and what have I done to deserve it?"
As her tears ceased, her eyes seemed to be looking into a future
that lacked the relief of tears. As though she were already passed
far on into it and were looking back to this moment, she went on,
speaking very slowly and sadly:
"We shall not see each other again in a long time, and whenever we
do, we shall be nothing to each other and we shall never speak of
this. There is one thing I wish to tell you. Some day you may
have false thoughts of me. You may think that I had no deep
feeling, no constancy, no mercy, no forgiveness; that it was easy
to give you up, because I never loved you. I shall have enough to
bear and I cannot bear that. So I want to tell you that you will
never know what my love for you was. A woman cannot speak till she
has the right; and before you gave me the right, you took it away.
For some little happiness it may bring me hereafter let me tell you
that you were everything to me, everything! If I had taught myself
to make allowances for you, if I had seen things to forgive in you,
what you told me would have been only one thing more and I might
have forgiven.
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