lways had a big house, a big income, a
position in society. What more can a woman want? Well, all these
things do not constitute the personal life. The remembrance of the
whole course of my personal life is a vivid one to me, and it seems to
have run through all these things like a thin thread of silver through
a mass of stuff. Looking back, this swirl of the social world, its
functions, its movements, the acquaintanceships it brought me, seem to
me all strangely unreal. I seem to be aware of a large, swarming
vision, amid which I have lived. But nothing of it has ever in-mingled
with my real sense of happiness or misery. Fortune, society--these are
not the essentials. The essentials are the same for all ranks, and it
is on those that personal happiness depends. Up to the age of
twenty-five even a clever girl may delude herself into thinking that
the hearty fun and enjoyment she may be extracting from her
circumstances and her position in the world are really what make
happiness, but if she have real brains, a clear vision and quick
sympathies, she will inevitably stifle in her atmosphere of mere
pleasure. She will not continue to set store on her material
advantages, on the stage accessories by which she may be surrounded.
She will long for something else--and most often not get it. If I had
only been penniless and had loved and married a man who had all his
fighting to do yet! I should have lived beside him, conscious of being
helpful, of being valued for what my companionship meant to him, with
a sense of my dignity and worth as a human being. Instead, I was born
rich, I married a man who had no fighting to do, and so I was a mere
mate to him. I was but a child and there was no one to warn me.
Everybody about me was stupid, enslaved to ideas that are rotten at
the core! We dangle baubles before our children and poison the fresh,
pure fount of humanity. Thus it is I have been a waste and useless
force in the world. If it had only been decreed to me to have children
of my own, I feel sure I should have been a better woman than I am."

Her voice died away in a strange sweet murmur. In her face there came
a look as of holy meditation; her eyes shone with a light of yearning.

"I am tired of England," she resumed in a moment. "I shall be going
away before long. I want to find some secluded spot near a lovely
Italian lake, where I may stay and rest indefinitely. Perhaps for
years, for I am very tired. I shall wait till I