on of a superior to you.
This trouble has come on you young, but that makes it in some respects
easier, and there is a benefit in all chastisement if we adjust our
minds to it."

This was precisely what Gwendolen was unable to do; and after her uncle
was gone, the bitter tears, which had rarely come during the late
trouble, rose and fell slowly as she sat alone. Her heart denied that
the trouble was easier because she was young. When was she to have any
happiness, if it did not come while she was young? Not that her visions
of possible happiness for herself were as unmixed with necessary evil
as they used to be--not that she could still imagine herself plucking
the fruits of life without suspicion of their core. But this general
disenchantment with the world--nay, with herself, since it appeared
that she was not made for easy pre-eminence--only intensified her sense
of forlornness; it was a visibly sterile distance enclosing the dreary
path at her feet, in which she had no courage to tread. She was in that
first crisis of passionate youthful rebellion against what is not fitly
called pain, but rather the absence of joy--that first rage of
disappointment in life's morning, which we whom the years have subdued
are apt to remember but dimly as part of our own experience, and so to
be intolerant of its self-enclosed unreasonableness and impiety. What
passion seems more absurd, when we have got outside it and looked at
calamity as a collective risk, than this amazed anguish that I and not
Thou, He or She, should be just the smitten one? Yet perhaps some who
have afterward made themselves a willing fence before the breast of
another, and have carried their own heart-wound in heroic silence--some
who have made their deeds great, nevertheless began with this angry
amazement at their own smart, and on the mere denial of their fantastic
desires raged as if under the sting of wasps which reduced the universe
for them to an unjust infliction of pain. This was nearly poor
Gwendolen's condition. What though such a reverse as hers had often
happened to other girls? The one point she had been all her life
learning to care for was, that it had happened to _her_: it was what
_she_ felt under Klesmer's demonstration that she was not remarkable
enough to command fortune by force of will and merit; it was what _she_
would feel under the rigors of Mrs. Mompert's constant expectation,
under the dull demand that she should be cheerful with thr