And with that came the whirlwind of perplexity. Must I go the first
moment I knew I could find him, and tell my uncle what had happened, and
how I felt? or must I have, and hold, and cherish in silent heart, a
thing so wondrous, so precious, so absorbing? Had I not deliberately
promised--of my own will and at my own instance--never again to have a
secret from him? Was this a secret? Was it not a secret?

The storm was up, and went on. The wonder is that, in the fire of the
new torment, I did not come to loathe the very thought of the young
man--which would have delivered me, if not from the necessity of
confession, yet from the main difficulty in confessing.

I said to myself that the old secret was of a wrong done to my uncle;
that what had made me miserable then was a bad secret. The perception of
this difference gave me comfort for a time, but not for long. The fact
remained, that I knew something concerning myself which my best friend
did not know. It was, and I could not prevent it from being, a barrier
between us!

Yet what was it I was concealing from him? What had I to tell him? How
was I to represent a thing of which I knew neither the name nor the
nature, a thing I could not describe? Could I confess what I did not
understand? The thing might be what, in the tales I had read, was called
love, but I did not know that it was. It might be something new, peculiar
to myself; something for which there was no word in the language! How was
I to tell? I saw plainly that, if I tried to convey my new experience, I
should not get beyond the statement that I had a new experience. It did
not occur to me that the thing might be so well known, that a mere hint
of the feelings concerned, would enable any older person to classify the