crisis of desperate misery, for refuge from the horror and the
insults of life. But there were always others to be considered. She
could not strike them so terrible a blow. Retreat was ruthlessly cut
off. Nothing remained but the endurance of a conscious slow decay;
nothing but increasing loss and feebleness, as the surly years went by.
They were going, going, these years of life, slipping away with their
spoils. Youth was departing, everything was vanishing; her very self,
bit by bit, slowly but surely, till the House of Life would grow narrow
and shrunken to the sight, the roof descend. The gruesome old story of
the imprisoned prince flashed into her mind; the wretched captive, young
and life-loving, who used to wake up, each morning, to find that of the
original seven windows of his dungeon, one had disappeared, while the
walls had advanced a foot, and to-morrow yet another foot, till at
length the last window had closed up, and the walls shrank together and
crushed him to death.

"I can't, I _can't_ endure it!"

Hadria had leaned forward against the key-board, which gave forth a loud
crash of discordant notes, strangely expressive of the fall and failure
of her spirit.

She remained thus motionless, while the airs wandered in from the
garden, and a broad ray of sunlight showed the strange incessant
gyrations of the dust atoms, that happened to lie within the revealing
brightness. The silence was perfect.

Hadria raised her head at last, and her eyes wandered out to the sweet
old garden, decked in the miraculous hues of spring. The unutterable
loveliness brought, for a second, a strange, inconsequent sense of
peace; it seemed like a promise and a message from an unknown god.

But after that momentary and inexplicable experience, the babble of
thought went on as before. The old dream mounted again heavenwards, like
a cloud at sunset; wild fancies fashioned themselves in the brain. And
then, in fantastic images, Hadria seemed to see a panorama of her own
life and the general life pass before her, in all their incongruity and
confusion. The great mass of that life showed itself as prose, because
the significance of things had not been grasped or suspected; but here
and there, the veil was pierced--by some suffering soul, by some poet's
vision--and the darkness of our daily, pompous, careworn, ridiculous
little existence made painfully visible.

"It is all absurd, all futile!" (so moved the procession of the
thou