a man who has no office to go to—­I dont care who he is—­is a trial of which you can have no conception.  So much for our present relations.  But I fear—­indeed I know—­that they will not last long.  I dare not look steadily at the future.  In spite of all that he has sacrificed for me, I cannot live forever with him.  There are times at which he inspires me with such a frenzy of aversion and disgust that I have to put the strongest constraint upon myself to avoid betraying my feelings to him.  We intended going to the West Indies direct from here, in search of some idyllic retreat where we could live alone together.  He still entertains this project; but as I have totally abandoned it I put him off with some pretext for remaining here whenever he mentions it.  I have only one hope of gaining a separation without being open to the reproach of having deserted him.  You remember how we disputed that Saturday about the merits of a grand passion, which I so foolishly longed for.  Well, I have tried it, and proved it to be a lamentable delusion, selfish, obstinate, blind, intemperate, and transient.  As it has evaporated from me, so it will evaporate from Sholto in the course of time.  It would have done so already, but that his love was more genuine than mine.  When the time comes, he will get rid of me without the least remorse; and so he will have no excuse for reviving his old complaints of my treachery.

“One new and very disagreeable feature in my existence, which I had partly prepared myself for, is the fear of detection.  We sailed before our flight had become public; and as there was fortunately no one on board who knew us, I had a nine days’ respite, and could fearlessly approach the other women, who, I suppose, would not have spoken to me had they known the truth.  But here it is different.  Ned’s patents are so much more extensively worked here than in England, and the people are so go-ahead, that they take a great interest in him, and are proud of him as an American.  The news got into the papers a few days after we arrived.  To appreciate the full significance of this, you should know what American newspapers are.  One of them actually printed a long account of my going away, with every paragraph headed in large print, ‘Domestic Unhappiness,’ ‘The Serpent in the Laboratory,’ ’The Temptation,’ ‘The Flight,’ ‘The Pursuit,’ and so on, all invented, of course.  Other papers give the most outrageous anecdotes.  Old jokes are revived and ascribed to us.  I am accused of tearing his hair out, and he of coming home late at nights drunk.  Two portraits of ferocious old women supposed to be Ned’s mother-in-law have been published.  The latest version appeared in a Sunday paper, and is quite popular in this hotel.  According to it, Ned was in the habit of ‘devoting me to science’ by trying electrical experiments on me.  ‘This,’ the account says, ’was kind of rough on the poor woman.’  The day before I ‘scooted,’ a new machine appeared before the house, drawn by six horses.  ’What