In plainer, uglier words, I meant to make you love me; and I was ready to carry you with me to that hell where souls are lost through love--and where we might lose our souls together.
"And now you will never write to me again." All the afternoon she bent at her desk, poring over his letter.

In her frightened heart she knew that something within her, not spiritual, had responded to what, in him, had evoked it; that her indefinable dread was dread of herself, of her physical responsiveness to his nearness, of her conscious inclination for it.
Could this be she--herself--who still bent here over his written words--this tense, hot-cheeked, tremulous creature, staring dry-eyed at the blurring lines which cut her for ever asunder from this self-outlawed man! Was this letter still unburned.

Had she not her fill of its brutality, its wickedness?
But she was very tired, and she laid her arms on the desk and her head between them.

And against her hot face she felt the cool letter-paper.
All that she had dreamed and fancied and believed and cared for in man passed dully through her mind.

Her own aspirations toward ideal womanhood followed--visions of lofty desire, high ideals, innocent passions, the happiness of renunciation, the glory of forgiveness---- She sat erect, breathing unevenly; then her eyes fell on the letter, and she covered it with her hands, as hands cover the shame on a stricken face.