Many women would, and I'm sure many men. I couldn't
do that because it would have made you less shining, though more dear in
my mind. And when I tell you that almost ever since you went away I have
been very ill, much of the time in horrible pain, you will see that you
gave me something to live up to when you said you needed my courage.
There's a fight going on all the time between my spirit and my body.
Sometimes, when the pain has been appalling, I have thought I would
write to you and ask you to release me from being brave. But I did not
want to seem to you a tortured thing--Sometimes, too, I have
deliberately pushed the morphia on one side and stuck it out. It was one
way of getting my own back on this bundle of nerves and sensations that
has played such havoc with me and that, as you scornfully told me, has
once or twice cheapened me to an unworthy pleasure--'like a queen going
on the streets.' I've been damned, damned, by this overlordship of the
body. Now I'm going to get rid of it, and even now I don't want to! I
know now I am dying, and there is morphia here under my hand. But I'll
be damned in pain rather than be beaten by it! I won't die a cow's
death, as the old Norsemen used to call it! I'll fight every inch of the
way.--But I wish Aunt Janet would come in and jab the needle in me,
forcibly.
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