was told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church,
and attend the Communion; I refused. Then came the distinct
alternative; conformity or exclusion from home--in other words,
hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.

A bitterly sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her,
with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the
intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not
pretend belief, was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully
than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the
difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six,
living alone. She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere
fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of
slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and
lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me
I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again
than live "in Society" under the burden of an acted lie.

The hardest struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to
cause her pain was tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been
rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling
mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself
on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed like a crime
to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
head was pressed against my knees. And yet--to live a lie? Not even
for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding
agony my will clung fast to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was
that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of
her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and