r that I threw myself on the bed by
Elsie to try to collect my thoughts. It was no use. I found my eyes and
mind wandering vaguely about the room. I was staring at the paper frieze
of garlanded roses, and the ugly, dingy paper below it of a hideous
lilac. What fiend ever suggested to my landlady the combination of
crimson roses and purplish paper? How I hate my environments! Poverty
and sybaritism go as ill together as roses and purple paper, but I have
always been too much given up to the gratification of the eyes and of
the senses. How well I remember in my first girlhood, how I used to fill
bowls with roses, lilacs and heliotrope, in the country June, and
putting beneath my cheek a little pillow, whose crimson silk gave me
delight, shut my eyes in my rough, unfinished little room, and the vales
of Persia and the scented glades of the tropics were mine to wander
through. Yes, a dreamer's Paradise, for I was only sixteen then, and
untroubled by any thoughts of Love; yet sometimes Its shadow would enter
and vaguely perplex me, a strange shape, waiting always beyond, in the
midst of my glowing gardens, and I sighed with a prescient pain. How
have I known Love since those days? As yet it has brought me but two
things--Sorrow and Expectation. In that fragmentary love-time that was
mine, I well remember one evening after he left me, that I threw myself
on the floor, and kissing the place where his dear foot had been set, I
prayed, still prostrate, the prayer I have so often prayed since. I
begged of God to let me barter for seven perfect days of love, all the
years that He had, perhaps, allotted to me. But my hot lips plead in
vain against the dusty floor, and it was to be that instead; he was to
leave me while love was still incomplete. But I know we shall meet
again, and I wait. He loved me, and does not that make waiting easy?

"My book _must_, it _shall_ succeed. It shall wipe out the stain on my
birth, it shall be enough to the world that I am what I am. To-night I
shall write half the night. No, there is Elsie. To-morrow, then, all
day. I shall not move from the desk. Oh! I have pierced my heart, to
write with its blood. It is an ink that ought to survive through the
centuries. Yet if it achieve my purpose for me, I care not if it is
forgotten in ten years.

"_February_ 12, 18--.

"I have seen him to-day, the only man I have ever loved. He loves me no
more. It is ended. What did _I_ say? I do not remember. I knew