are quite as willing to have definitely arranged, and at once, as myself.
I can say what I mean, and as I mean it, so much better on paper than in
conversation--as I have so little self-possession, and am so readily put
out in the matter of argument--that I have determined to write to you,
thinking thus to be better able to make you understand and appreciate my
reasons and motives, since you can read them when and how you choose.

I have been your wife three weeks. The horrible strangeness of these words
is quite beyond me to compass; nevertheless, realize it or not, it is a
fact. I am your wife--you, my husband. Why I am your wife I wish simply to
rehearse here. Not that we do not both know why, but that we may know it
in the same way. You, a handsome, cultivated man, whose dictum is
considered law in the world of fashion in which you move and reign, with
an assured social position, a handsome fortune, and a popularity that
would have obtained for you the hand of any beautiful or wealthy woman
whom you sought, have deliberately chosen to make me, a poor, plain,
brown-faced little school-teacher, your wife. Not because you wanted _me_,
not because you thought or cared about _me_, one way or the other, but
simply because, in a time of urgent necessity, I was literally the only
available woman near you. It chanced, from many points of view and by a
chain of circumstances, that I was particularly available. So you married
me. The reasons for such a sacrifice of yourself were--you had behaved
badly, very badly, to a lady, compromising her name and causing a
separation between herself and her husband. Within a few months, her
husband having died, both herself and her father had determined to force
you to make her reparation by marriage. Going to work very warily, they
had taken an opportunity, after a very luxuriant and fast opera-supper,
when you were excited by your surroundings and flushed by the wine you had
been drinking, your head very light, your judgment very heavy, to draw
from you a promise of marriage at the expiration of the year of mourning