hundred yards, her courage
began to fail, and the further she went, the more her spirits sank. Her
surroundings were indescribably depressing: the smirched, steadily
retreating snow was leaving bare all the drab brownness it had
concealed--all the dismal little gardens, and dirty corners. Houses,
streets and people wore their most bedraggled air. Particularly the
people: they were as ugly as the areas of roof and stone, off which the
soft white coating had slid; their contours were as painful to see. And
the mud--oh, God, the mud! It spread itself over every inch of the way;
the roads were rivers of filth, which spattered and splashed; at the
sides of the streets, the slush was being swept into beds. Before she
had gone any distance, her boots and skirts were heavy with it; and she
hated mud, she sobbed--hated it, loathed it, it affected her with a
physical disgust--and this lie might have known when he sent her out.
In the ROSENTAL, it was no better; the paths were so soaked that they
squashed under her feet; on both sides, lay layers of rotten leaves
from the autumn; the trees were only a net-work of blackened twigs,
their trunks surrounded by an undergrowth that was as ragged as unkempt
hair. And everything was mouldering: the smell of moist, earthy decay
reminded her of open graves. Not a soul was visible but herself. She
sat on a seat, the only living creature in the scene, and the past rose
before her with resistless force: the intensity of her happiness; the
base cruelty of his conduct; her misery, her unspeakable misery; her
forlorn desolation, which was of a piece with the desolation around
her, and which would never again be otherwise, though she lived to be
an old woman.--How long she sat thinking things of this kind, she did
not know. But all of a sudden she started up, frightened both by her
wretched thoughts and by the loneliness of the wood; and she fled, not
looking behind her, or pausing to take breath, till she reached the
streets. Into the first empty droschke she met, she had sunk exhausted,
and been driven home.

It was of no use trying to reason with her, or to console her.

"I can't bear my life," she sobbed. "It's too hard ... and there is no
one to help me. If I had done anything to deserve it ... then it would
be different ... then I shouldn't complain. But I didn't--didn't do
anything--unless it was that I cared too much. At least it was a
mistake--a dreadful mistake. I should never have show