I went then from one place to another in shrinking fear of detection. In each one my experience was repeated until I believe I began to wear the air of a hunted creature.
So suspicious were my actions that at last a drug clerk shook my little worn-out slip of paper against the glass perfume case and scowled at me.
"The last half of the doctor's name is torn off," he said insolently. "Where did you get this?"
"I'm sorry," he snarled. "We don't sell that under these circumstances. Where do you live, madam?"
There I noticed that a tall young man, who had been staring at me, with a row of gold teeth accenting a diabolical smile, had followed me from the store. After I had walked half a block to find my carriage, he spoke to me.
"I can sell you something just as good," he whispered by my side. "I do a little quiet business in it. It's not for yourself, is it?"
"No," I said, trembling from head to foot. "It is for an unfortunate woman, whose name must not be disclosed."
"Call her She," he suggested with a leer. "Here is an address. Send a messenger boy whenever you like. Every one thinks I am a perfume manufacturer."
This was the opening of greater comfort to me; my terror of detection was lessened. As time passed I found that my moral sense was being dulled, little by little. I was fulfilling my destiny. I was living according to my arrangement of brain cells. In spite of his warning--or perhaps solely because of it--the fears of my foster father were realized. I was I!
Four weeks ago came a new thing. It burst like dynamite. It gripped my heart. It felt along the chords of my womanhood. I could not escape its presence. It cried to me in the darkness. It walked beside me in the sunlight.
It has been hard for me to tell coldly of my first weakness; it will be harder still for me to write of what has followed, without letting escape on this page the emotions which are in my heart. This new thing awakened me with a start from my slumber of indifference and my philosophy of defeat.
With a sudden return of my old self I began to have my first doubts about the powers of heredity. I began to wonder if fear of myself, inspired by knowledge of whence I came, rather than any true inherited traits, had not been my undoing. I found that I had not changed so much, after all. The goodness in me had not gone. I saw in my mirror the Julianna you had known and loved. I felt new faith.