The letter was the last
expression of a disappointed and barren life. The slow, stammering tongue
of an almost silent existence had found the fulness of speech. The
fountains of the deep had been broken up, and Sybil Eglington's repressed
emotions, undeveloped passions, tortured by mortal sufferings, and
refined and vitalised by the atmosphere blown in upon her last hours from
the Hereafter, were set free, given voice and power at last.
The letter reviewed the life she had lived with her husband during
twenty-odd years, reproved herself for not speaking out and telling him
his faults at the beginning, and for drawing in upon herself, when she
might have compelled him to a truer understanding; and, when all that was
said, called him to such an account as only the dying might make--the
irrevocable, disillusionising truth which may not be altered, the
poignant record of failure and its causes.
". . . I could not talk well, I never could, as a girl," the
letter ran; "and you could talk like one inspired, and so
speciously, so overwhelmingly, that I felt I could say nothing in
disagreement, not anything but assent; while all the time I felt how
hollow was so much you said--a cloak of words to cover up the real
thought behind.
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