I forgot it the
other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pass through a
certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress
it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke--my
restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to
give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want
your signature; I only want your confidence--only what springs from
that. I hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you don't it
must not be because you have promised me. You know what I think--that
there is something noble done when one makes a sacrifice for a great
good. Priests--when they were real priests--never married, and what you
and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood. It seems to me
very poor, when friendship and faith and charity and the most
interesting occupation in the world--when such a combination as this
doesn't seem, by itself, enough to live for. No man that I have ever
seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish.
They hate it; they scorn it; they will try to stamp it out whenever they
can. Oh yes, I know there are men who pretend to care for it; but they
are not really men, and I wouldn't be sure even of them! Any man that
one would look at--with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us to
the knife.
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