I chose the latter.
A bitterly sad time followed.

My dear mother was heart-broken.

To her, with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not pretend belief, was incomprehensible.

She recognised far more fully than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six, living alone.

She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of slander.