"It was not until I went to New York that the feelings I then experienced
took on a definite shape. There, removed from my old haunts, I wandered
alone when I could. Then I thought of you, my friend, of you, my child,
and beside you I was pitiful, --pitiful, because in my narrowness I had
thought myself strong enough to uphold a vanishing restriction. I resolved
to be practical; I have been accused of being a dreamer. I grasped your
two images before me and drew parallels. Socially each was as high as the
other. Mentally the woman was as strong in her sphere as the man was in
his. Physically both were perfect types of pure, healthy blood. Morally
both were irreproachable. Religiously each held a broad love for God and
man. I stood convicted; I was in the position of a blind fool who, with a
beautiful picture before him, fastens his critical, condemning gaze upon a
rusting nail in the rusting wall behind, --a nail even now loosened, and
which in another generation will be displaced. Yet what was I to do? Come
back and tell you that I had been needlessly cruel? What would that avail?
True, I might make you believe that I no longer thought marriage between
you wrong; but that would not remove the fact that the world, which so
easily makes us happy or otherwise, did not see as I saw.
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