That summer of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at
the mission church in the spring, our knowledge of each other being an
almost negligeable quantity. We were thrown together for a week, the
only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two
before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted
as I had allowed him such full companionship--a perfectly fair
assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible
husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were
in quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by
what seemed to my strict views an assumption that I had been flirting,
I hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
confidence, and left me--the most upset and distressed little person
on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. "Drifted" is the
right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest