Burned Bridges

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.