er
hope and imagination had burst, leaving only a bitter and unpleasant
sense of the paltry and unclean materials--the soap-suds and
clay-pipe--wherewith it had been created.

Furthermore, the polite fictions which she had lubricated her conscience
withal, regarding her desires and intentions, were shown up at precisely
their true value, and a very discreditable spectacle they made. Nothing
is more exasperating after a failure than to be stared out of
countenance by the unworthy means we have employed. During her progress
up-stairs to the dressing-room, and brief stay there, Cornelia had ample
leisure to review her thoughts and deeds during the latter months of her
life. What a waste of time, opportunity, and emotion! It was a tragedy
of ridicule and a farce of profound pathos.

Her perception of these things was assisted by the depression which
reacted upon her previous excitement: it had an embarrassing way of
presenting, in the clearest colors, whatever in her conduct had been
most unwise and indefensible. She could have borne it easily had there
been as much as one stirring struggle for victory, even had the struggle
resulted in defeat. Her state of mind might have borne analogy to his
who, having deeply caroused overnight in celebration of some glorious
triumph, learned, upon coming to his racked and tortured senses the next
day, that it was a triumph for the other side.

Had the sense of despair been less overwhelming, had Cornelia been
merely disappointed, rage would have taken the place of depression, and
her thoughts would have run in far different channels. But there was no
hope: this was her last chance of all: hereafter a rampart would be
erected against her, which she neither was able nor dared to scale.
There was no element in her position that could make it endurable, and
yet there was no escape. She had not enough spirit of enterprise left to
return home at once, but yielded herself with torpid insensibility to
whoever chose to make a suggestion. She wonderingly speculated as to how
she had ever been able to originate an idea herself.

The evening dragged its slow length along, and dragged Cornelia with it.
To be where she was, was insupportable; but to go back to the Parsonage
was worse still; and the thought of the solitary drive thither with the
overflowing Mr. Reynolds filled her with a nauseating pain of
anticipation.

It could not have been far from midnight when she awoke to a sense of
being