diculous, a cruel game which we play
for life while cursing it.

No! I regret not this, but I do regret the indolence, the idleness of
mind succeeding such trivial exertions. For then there were no
resolutions to make, no characters to study, and, above all, no
responsibility to bear, nothing to choose, nothing to change.

I had but to follow every morning the path marked out by necessity the
evening before.

If I were able to copy or originate some hundred designs; if I possessed
sufficient carmine or cobalt to color some wretched
engravings--worthless, but fashionable--which I must myself deliver on
the morrow; if I could succeed in finding some new patterns for
embroidery and tapestry, I was content--and for recreation indulged at
evenings in the sweetest, that is most absurd, reveries.

Revery then was a rest to me, now it is a labor, and a dangerous labor
when too often resorted to; good thoughts then came to assist me in my
misery; now, vexatious presentiments torment my happiness. Then the
uncertainty of my future made me mistress of events. I could each day
choose a new destiny, and new adventures. My unexpected and undeserved
misfortune was so complete that I had nothing more to dread and
everything to hope for, and experienced a vague feeling of gratitude for
the ultimate succor that I confidently expected.

I would pass long hours gazing from my window at a little light shining
from the fourth-story window of a distant house. What strange
conjectures I made, as I silently watched the mysterious beacon!

Sometimes, in contemplating it, I recalled the questions addressed by
Childe Harold to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, asking the cold marble if
she who rested there were young and beautiful, a dark-eyed,
delicate-featured woman, whose destiny was that reserved by Heaven for
those it loves; or was she a venerable matron who had outlived her
charms, her children and her kindred?

So I also questioned this solitary light:

To what distressed soul did it lend its aid? Some anxious mother
watching and praying beside her sick child, or some youthful student
plunging with stern delight into the arcana of science, to wrest from
the revealing spirits of the night some luminous truth?

But while the poet questioned death and the past, I questioned the
living present, and more than once the distant beacon seemed to answer
me. I even imagined that this busy light flickered in concert with mine,
and that they brig