Priscilla wanted to run away. This, I believe, is considered an awful
thing to do even if you are only a housemaid or somebody's wife. If it
were not considered awful, placed by the world high up on its list of
Utter Unforgivablenesses, there is, I suppose, not a woman who would
not at some time or other have run. She might come back, but she would
surely have gone. So bad is it held to be that even a housemaid who
runs is unfailingly pursued by maledictions more or less definite
according to the education of those she has run from; and a wife who
runs is pursued by social ruin, it being taken for granted that she
did not run alone. I know at least two wives who did run alone. Far
from wanting yet another burden added to them by adding to their lives
yet another man, they were anxiously endeavouring to get as far as
might be from the man they had got already. The world, foul hag with
the downcast eyes and lascivious lips, could not believe it possible,
and was quick to draw its dark mantle of disgrace over their shrinking
heads. One of them, unable to bear this, asked her husband's pardon.
She was a weak spirit, and now lives prostrate days, crushed beneath
the unchanging horror of a husband's free forgiveness. The other took
a cottage and laughed at the world. Was she not happy at last, and
happy in the right way? I go to see her sometimes, and we eat the
cabbages she has grown herself. Strange how the disillusioned find
their peace in cabbages.

Priscilla, then, wanted to run away. What is awful in a housemaid and
in anybody's wife became in her case stupendous. The spirit that could
resolve it, decide to do it without being dragged to it by such things
as love or passion, calmly looking the risks and losses in the face,
and daring everything to free itself, was, it must be conceded, at
least worthy of respect. Fritzing thought it worthy of adoration; the