Perhaps I am as discreet, honourable and loyal as the ordinary man, but I confess that at times I have a frantic desire to escape to the moon and tell all I know, or to unburden myself of the weight of dynamic confidences, pouring my revelations into the ears of some responsive idiot. In the old days a corpse was fastened to the felon’s back in punishment of certain crimes, and to me a secret seems almost as deadly a load. The temptation to vivify the tale and make it walk abroad on its own legs is hard to deny.
There are secrets so dangerous that to possess them is foolhardy. It is like storing dynamite in one’s drawing-room; an explosion is always imminent, and publication would mean disaster. I have known secrets myself, so outrageous, so bulging with scandal, that, had I not promptly forgotten them, they would have undone society twenty times over! There is a titilating pleasure in the keeping of such terrific truths and it increases one’s inward pride to think that one knows of another what, if told, would change the aspect of a life. The temptation to tell is like being in church and suddenly seized with an almost irresistible impulse to shriek aloud, or like standing at the verge of a cliff and being impelled to throw one’s self over. To give way to the perfidious thought means moral death, and when one falls, one brings others down as well.
Many of us, though we conceit ourselves to be worthy of trust, are, as regards our secrets, in a state of unstable equilibrium. Women, seeing and feeling things more personally and subjectively than men, are especially hazardously poised. So long as the friendship with the confidant is preserved, the secret is safe, but let estrangement come, and suddenly the balance becomes top-heavy; one’s morality falls and the secret escapes in the crash of anger. I have known women who felt themselves quite free to tell secrets when the proper owner of them proved guilty of unfaithfulness. The difference in viewpoint of the sexes seems to be this: men have a definite code of honour, certain well-recognized laws of conduct acknowledged even by those who do not always obey them. "The brand of the dog is upon him by whom is a secret revealed." If a woman is honourable (in the man’s sense of the term), it is a test of her individual character, and not of conformity to any feminine ethical system.