You see, I am trying to be brutally frank. I am trying to empty
my mind out to you, and a bit of my heart. I like you a lot, big
man. I don't mind making that confession. If you were not a
preacher--if you did not see life through such narrow eyes, if
you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting
yourself in the other fellow's shoes now and then, if only your
creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital--I--but
those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.
It's no use, preacher man. That day you kissed me on the creek
bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of
loving you--but it was under protest--under pretty much the same
protest with which you care for me. You were both times carried
away so by your own passion that for the moment your mental
reservations were in abeyance. And although perhaps a breath of
that same passion stirred me--I can admit it now when the
distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your
hands--yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering:
"Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."
There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me.
But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's
deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate
protection--as he has often made plain--to think, to know why I
do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And
I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that
would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms
drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same
breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse
of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your
deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of
good and evil, of right and wrong--I what I am, a creature
craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever
and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it. I
wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in
that sort of atmosphere.
Even if you were not a minister--if you were just plain man--and
I wish you were--I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I
have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses
may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures
(vide Havelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology
of sex among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men
in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I
have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read
and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I
don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my
habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being
moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so
simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I
know myself, within certain limits--but men I do not know at all,
except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and
Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you
both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled
ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe
attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimately--and that
alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many
matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more
protective passion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you--and
mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I
could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours,
and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash,
until we should hate each other.