hitherto spotless page of my dealings with my fellow-creatures, stamped
with a foul indelible stain, that cried shame and retribution on my
whole generation. I fled--of course--when the hasty realization of my
misdeeds forced itself into my mind. I was frantic and desperate as I
tried to make my way through the thicket, and at last on arriving at the
village, I took the midnight train and travelled to a town in the State
of Maine. From this place I wrote to my creditors, confessing my
financial difficulties, and begging of them not to seek me out, nor take
any further interest in me, as I had resolved to begin my blighted life
over again, in a strange land among strange people. I tried O, Elersley!
God knows how hard, to earn honest bread, but I did not deserve success,
and so God refused to bless my labor. I left Maine, and came here to New
York, two years ago. I turned my hand to everything, but the bitter
sting of misfortune was at the bottom of all. I tried my pen, recently,
for my limbs seemed incompetent for any active service, but sitting here
in this little narrow room, through the long night, trying to invent
some gay little snatch of fiction out of the store of a mind so crushed
and oppressed, was too bitter a mockery to last very long. My fair
fashionable heroines looked at me in my dreams with eyes blood-shot and
revengeful, saying, 'This is what you have brought me to.' For I
suppose, Elersley, that girl never did a day's good since. Her fate has
been constantly preying on my mind. I have spent a life of wretched
expiation already in this world, God only knows what awaits me in the
next. I have studiously avoided the sex I have outraged by this deed,
feeling myself an outcast and a traitor in their presence. I have turned
my back on the few haunts of pleasure that were open to me, for the
sound of my own voice in gaiety, frightened and reproached me. As for
_him_ Elersley, though I have not seen him, nor heard of him, since, yet
I know he is revelling in the luxury of his ill-gotten wealth."