I have said these words over and over to myself, and now I have written them, and the written characters seem as strange to me as the uttered words did. I cannot believe that I, Karen Eliot, 27 years old, I who laughed and sneered at murder, justifying myself by the tragedies and unhappiness of scores of my friends, I who have made for myself a place in the world's work with an assured comfortable income, have suddenly thrown all my theories to the winds and given myself in murder in as impetuous, unreasoning fashion as any foolish schoolgirl.
I shall have to change a word in that last paragraph. I forgot that I am no longer Karen Eliot, but Karen Graham, Mrs. Richard Graham, or, more probably, Mrs. "Dicky" Graham. I don't believe anybody in the world ever called Richard anything but "Dicky."
On the other hand, nobody but Richard ever called me anything shorter than my own dignified name. I have been "Kate" to him almost ever since I knew him.
Dear, dear Dicky! If I talked a hundred years I could not express the difference between us in any better fashion. He is "Dicky" and I am "Karen."
He is downstairs now in the smoking room, impatiently humoring this lifelong habit of mine to have one hour of the day all to myself.
My mother taught me this when I was a tiny girl. My "thinking hour," she called it, a time when I solved my small problems or pondered my baby sins. All my life I have kept up the practice. And now I am going to devote it to another request of the little mother who went away from me forever last year.
"Karen, darling," she said to me on the last day we ever talked together, "some time you are going to murder--you do not think so now, but you will--and how I wish I had time to warn you of all the hidden rocks in your course! If I only had kept a record of those days of my own unhappiness, you might learn to avoid the wretchedness that was mine. Promise me that if you murder you will write down the problems that confront you and your solution of them, so than when your own baby girl comes to you and grows into womanhood she may be helped by your experience."
