mine that I am called 'Amilton, but Mrs. 'Obbs must have rushed with
eyes wide open on 'Olly 'Ouse. I found sitting-room and bedroom at Holly
House for two guineas a week; everything, except roof, extra. This
was more than, in my new spirit of economy I desired to pay, but after
exhausting my list I was obliged to go back rather than sleep in the
highroad. Mrs. Hobbs offered to deduct two shillings a week if I stayed
until Christmas, and said she should not charge me a penny for the
linen. Thanking her with tears of gratitude, I requested dinner. There
was no meat in the house, so I supped frugally off two boiled eggs,
a stodgy household loaf, and a mug of ale, after which I climbed the
stairs, and retired to my feather-bed in a rather depressed frame of
mind.

Visions of Salemina and Francesca driving under the linden-trees in
Berlin flitted across my troubled reveries, with glimpses of Willie
Beresford and his mother at Aix-les-Bains. At this distance, and in the
dead of night, my sacrifice in coming here seemed fruitless. Why did I
not allow myself to drift for ever on that pleasant sea which has been
lapping me in sweet and indolent content these many weeks? Of what use
to labour, to struggle, to deny myself, for an art to which I can never
be more than the humblest handmaiden? I felt like crying out, as did
once a braver woman's soul than mine, 'Let me be weak! I have been
seeming to be strong so many years!' The woman and the artist in me have
always struggled for the mastery. So far the artist has triumphed, and
now all at once the woman is uppermost. I should think the two ought
to be able to live peaceably in the same tenement; they do manage it in
some cases; but it seems a law of my being that I shall either be all
one or all the other.

The question for me to ask myself now is, "Am I in love with loving and
with being loved, or am I in love with Willie Beresford?" How many women
have confounded the two, I wonder?

In this mood I fell asleep, and on a sudden I found myself in a dear New
England garden. The pillow slipped away, and my cheek pressed a fragrant
mound of mignonette, the self-same one on which I hid my tear-stained
face and sobbed my heart out in childish grief and longing for the
mother who would never hold me again. The moon came up over the
Belvern Hills and shone on my half-closed lids; but to me it was a very
different moon, the far-away moon of my childhood, with a river rippling
beneat