fer positive benefit on others, I may
go my way without serious reproach.

And I did wisely not to marry, for I should have clung too closely to my
study for the happiness of any woman. I once saw an advertisement in
the newspaper inserted by a discontented young wife whose husband was a
recluse and would not take her out of evenings. She wanted to
communicate with congenial people, and, like a desperate sailor
marooned, was driven to wave her signal in the sight of the casual eye.
This frank confession of abandonment made a profound impression upon me.
I thought to myself, "Master recluse, you are a pilferer and have
filched a life. I am yet more solitary in my estate, and if I followed
your example, should be guilty of a greater wrong." There are, indeed,
hours when I feel embittered at the thought that for one innocent defect
a whole life should be amerced of joy; the finality of loss appals: all
is so irrevocable; _le vase est imbibe, l'etoffe a pris son pli_.
Avoided not without cause by those who were my natural associates, I
grow impenetrable of access, and even in my own family unfamiliar. The
resentment that welled up in the man who told the story of Henry
Ryecroft obtains the mastery, and I feel one in spirit with that lonely
analyst of disillusions. Sometimes a worse darkness gathers round, till
I long for one of those intense and all-absorbing creeds which somehow
seem to tend the brightest hearth-fires which earth knows: for
philosophy, though it invented the void, never built a little Gidding.

It is then that I feel like the suppliant of the old Babylonian prayer,
"one whose kin are afar off, whose city is distant," and all that
appears before my sight is one scroll of wrongs which this evil heritage
has inflicted upon me. It has made my best years rich in misery; it has
cut me off from marriage; it has compelled me, one hating vain
complaint, to live querulously in the optative mood. Neither poverty nor
sickness could chastise more heavily; for poverty is strong in numbers
and sickness rich in sympathy, but diffidence reaps laughter and is
alone. When such thoughts win dominion over the mind I could envy what
sufferer you will his most awful punishment. For in his agony be sure
there is movement and action; his limbs are torn, yet he is dragged
onward: by his very writhing in the bonds he confesses his life. But I
lie in some dead waste where nothing moves and all is mist without
horizon, lost in an abh