This was the letter I was to answer unknown to her father. I saw her honor standing out white and unassailable in it: I saw even her modesty, and, above all, her truth and the womanly knowledge of what a wife should be to her husband. I also saw that her father's will was her law; that her father's will had influenced her ever; and that when I first proffered my request of him for his daughter in marriage she took such a request as his will: had he said No, her answer would have been likewise: as it was Yes, she had acquiesced. But the pain of it! the pain of it!
I never once, from the minute the words clung to my mind like burning iron to flesh, questioned as to how I must reply to the letter: the reply shaped itself while I read her words. Could I take to myself a wife who cared little for me? I cared too much for Barbara to have such a wife.
And yet when I had come to friend Afton's house and entered my room, I closed and locked the door before I sat down to reply to the letter, as though I were doing a guilty deed. My hand trembled: the words I wrote were blurred. I heard a low knock at my door, but I answered it not: why should even a demented woman see me as I was? I wrote and re-wrote my answer before I found it fitted to my mind. My letter must have not myself in it: it must be clean of all foolish extravagance. And yet I extenuated, for I called for another letter from her. I wrote, Did she rightly know her mind? was she firm in her reasoning? _and who was the man?_ I had not intended writing that last, but something forced me to it: it was not vain curiosity, for curiosity is too far removed from pain to be a part of it. But I could not see whom she could possibly know of all the inhabitants of the place that could thus exercise her spirit. There were few people there whom she had not known for years, and it was not likely she should have known any one all this time and only now be awakened to a greater knowledge. Perhaps a cruel feeling of jealousy actuated me in some measure. Why, I reasoned, had friend Barbara thus led me on? But I stopped there. Had she led me on? Nay. She had never given me reason to think that I was aught to her: I had ever wrestled in spirit, hoping that she would see in me what I saw so clearly in her--all that I could ever care to call my own. She had never tried to deceive me by false words or looks or actions: she had been true to her instincts as a woman in all this time, and had been as I had seen her. Too truly I saw that the care had been upon my side alone--that when I was most uplifted in spirit it was because I had been blinded to anything save my own inordinate feeling and hope of comfort. I forgot all else as I sat there with her letter in my hand; and even my discipline was of little account when I folded my arms across the table and let my head rest there for a little while.