"I now write to you my last letter and my farewell.
"In the overwrought and desperate mood in which you found me, it did
not seem a sin for me to go away with the man who loved me and whom I
loved, before false ideas of life and false ideas of duty made him
the husband of another. Conscious that your wife was a hopeless
lunatic whose present or future could in no way be influenced by our
actions, I reasoned that we wronged no one in taking the happiness so
long denied us.
"The last three years of my life have been full of desolation and
sorrow. From the day my mother died, the stars of light which had
gemmed the firmament for me, seemed one by one to be obliterated,
until I stood in utter darkness. You found me in the very blackest
hour of all--and you seemed a shining sun to me.
"Yet so soon as my tired brain and sorrow-worn heart were able to
think and reason, I realised that it was not the man I had worshipped
as an ideal, who had come to me and asked me to lower my standard of
womanhood. It was another and less worthy man--and this other was to
be my companion through time, and perhaps eternity. When I learned
that your insane wife was my sister, and that knowing this fact you
yet planned our flight, an indescribable feeling of repulsion awoke
in my heart.
"I confess that this arose more from a sentiment than a principle.
The relationship of your wife to me made the contemplated sin no
greater, but rendered it more tasteless.
"Had I gone away with you as I consented to do, the world would have
said, she but follows her fatal inheritance--like mother like
daughter. There were some bitter rebellious hours, when that thought
came to me. But to-day light has shone upon me, and I know there is
a law of Divine Heredity which is greater and more powerful than any
tendency we derive from parents or grandparents. I have believed
much in creeds all my life; and in the hour of great trials I found I
was leaning on broken reeds. I have now ceased to look to men or
books for truth--I have found it in my own soul. I acknowledge no
unfortunate tendencies from any earthly inheritance; centuries of
sinful or weak ancestors are as nothing beside the God within. The
divine and immortal ME is older than my ancestral tree; it is as old
as the universe. It is as old as the first great Cause of which it
is a part. Strong with this consciousness, I am prepared to meet the
world alone, and unafraid from this day onward. When I think of the
optimistic temperament, the good brain, and the vigorous body which
were naturally mine, and then of the wretched being who was my
legitimate sister, I know that I was rightly generated, however
unfortunately born, just as she was wrongly generated though legally
born.