human
he took it! To save herself from this speculation which seemed to dig into a grave, and touch and handle the decaying body of love, she would plan what she should say to him when, after a while,
gpt
perhaps, she should be able to take up her pen:
human
David,--I was out of my head. Think of me as if I were dead. . . .
gpt
David,--I don't want you to forgive me. I want you to hate me as I hate myself. . . .
human
David,--I was not in my right mind--forgive me. I love you just the same. But it is as if I were dead. Again and again she had thought out long, crying, frightened letters to him; but she had not written them. And now she was beginning to feel, vaguely, that she would never write them.
gpt
What is the use? I am dead. The idea of calling upon him to come and save her, never occurred to her.
human
I am dead, she said, as she sat there, her face hidden in her arms;
gpt
It was insanity, she said, shivering at the memory of that hour in the toll-house--that little mad hour, that brought eternity with it! She had had other crazy hours, with no such weight of consequence. Her mind went back over her engagement: her love, her happiness--and her tempers. Well, nothing had come of them. David always understood. And still further back: her careless, fiery girlhood--when the knowledge of her mother's recreancy, undermining her sense of responsibility by the condoning suggestion of heredity, had made her quick to excuse her lack of self-control. Her girlhood had been full of those outbreaks of passion, which she
human
Oh, she said, brokenly,
gpt
But she did not dwell upon the responsibility of other people. She forgot the easy excuse of 'heredity.' This new knowledge brought with it a vision of her own responsibility that filled her appalled mind to the exclusion of everything else. It is not the pebble that turns the current--it is the easy slope that invites it. All her life Elizabeth had been inviting this moment; and the moment, when it came, was her Day of Judgment. What she had thought of as an incredible injustice of fate in letting a mad instant turn the scales for a whole life, was merely an inevitable result of all that had preceded it. When this fierce and saving knowledge came to her, she thought of Blair.
human
I have spoiled my own life and David's life. I needn't spoil Blair's. He said if I left him, it would destroy him.... Perhaps if I stay, it will be my punishment. I can never be punished enough.