though not even serving to write such a tangled scrawl as this. I am of
no mortal service. In two days I shall be out of England. Within a week
you shall hear where. I long for your heart on mine, your dear eyes.
You have faith in me, and I fly from you!--I must be mad. Yet I feel
calmly reasonable. I know that this is the thing to do. Some years
hence a grey woman may return, to hear of a butterfly Diana, that had her
day and disappeared. Better than a mewing and courtseying simulacrum of
the woman--I drivel again. Adieu. I suppose I am not liable to capture
and imprisonment until the day when my name is cited to appear. I have
left London. This letter and I quit the scene by different routes--I
would they were one. My beloved! I have an ache--I think I am wronging
you. I am not mistress of myself, and do as something within me, wiser,
than I, dictates.--You will write kindly. Write your whole heart. It is
not compassion I want, I want you. I can bear stripes from you. Let me
hear Emma's voice--the true voice. This running away merits your
reproaches. It will look like--. I have more to confess: the tigress in
me wishes it were! I should then have a reckless passion to fold me
about, and the glory infernal, if you name it so, and so it would be--
of suffering for and with some one else. As it is, I am utterly
solitary, sustained neither from above nor below, except within myself,
and that is all fire and smoke, like their new engines.--I kiss this
miserable sheet of paper. Yes, I judge that I have run off a line--and
what a line! which hardly shows a trace for breathing things to follow
until they feel the transgression in wreck. How immensely nature seems
to prefer men to women!--But this paper is happier than the writer.

'Your TONY.'

That was the end. Emma kissed it in tears. They had often talked of the
possibility of a classic friendship between women, the alliance of a