“It will not be necessary for you to acknowledge this letter and its enclosures. I will register the package, so that it will not fail to reach you, and I will return any answer of yours unopened, or, if not recognizably addressed, then unread.
He read and read again these lines, with only the sense of their insufficiency in doing the effect of the bitterness in his heart. If the letter was insulting, it was by no means as insulting as he would have liked to make it. Whether it would be wounding enough was something that depended upon the person whom he wished to wound. All that was proud and vain and cruel in him surged up at the thought of the trick that had been played upon him, and all that was sweet and kind and gentle in him, when he believed the trick was a genuine appeal, turned to their counter qualities. Yet, feeble and inadequate as his letter was, he knew that he could not do more or worse by trying, and he so much feared that by waiting he might do less and better that he hurried it into the post at once. If his mother had been at hand he would have shown it her, though he might not have been ruled by her judgment of it. He was glad that she was not with him, for either she would have had her opinion of what would be more telling, or she would have insisted upon his delaying any sort of reply, and he could not endure the thought of difference or delay.
He asked himself whether he should let her see the rough first draft of his letter or not, and he decided that he would not. But when she came into his study on her return he showed it her.
She read it in silence, and then she seemed to temporize in asking, “Where are her two letters?”
His mother let the paper drop from her hands. “Philip! You haven’t sent this!”
“Yes, I have. It wasn’t what I wanted to make it, but I wished to get the detestable experience out of my mind, and it was the best I could do at the moment. Don’t you like it?”
“Oh--” She seemed beginning to say something, but without saying anything she took the fallen leaf up and read it again.
“Oh, you may have been right. I hope you’ve not been wrong.”
“She deserved the severest things you could say; and yet--”
“Perhaps she was punished enough already.”