ed a few evenings before, she went and
sat down on it with a resigned grace while the young man, silent before
her and watching her, took from her the mute assurance that if she was
charitable now he must at least be very wise.

"Something came to my knowledge yesterday," he said as he sat down
beside her, "which gave me an intense impression of your loneliness.
You're truth itself, and there's no truth about you. You believe in
purity and duty and dignity, and you live in a world in which they're
daily belied. I ask myself with vain rage how you ever came into such a
world, and why the perversity of fate never let me know you before."

She waited a little; she looked down, straight before her. "I like my
'world' no better than you do, and it was not for its own sake I came
into it. But what particular group of people is worth pinning one's
faith upon? I confess it sometimes seems to me men and women are very
poor creatures. I suppose I'm too romantic and always was. I've an
unfortunate taste for poetic fitness. Life's hard prose, and one must
learn to read prose contentedly. I believe I once supposed all the
prose to be in America, which was very foolish. What I thought, what I
believed, what I expected, when I was an ignorant girl fatally addicted
to falling in love with my own theories, is more than I can begin
to tell you now. Sometimes when I remember certain impulses, certain
illusions of those days they take away my breath, and I wonder that my
false point of view hasn't led me into troubles greater than any I've
now to lament. I had a conviction which you'd probably smile at if
I were to attempt to express it to you. It was a singular form for
passionate faith to take, but it had all of the sweetness and the ardour
of passionate faith. It led me to take a great step, and it lies
behind me now, far off, a vague deceptive form melting in the light of
experience. It has faded, but it hasn't vanished. Some feelings, I'm
sure, die only with ourselves; some illusions are as much the condition
of our life as our heart-beats. They say that life itself is an
illusion--that this world is a shadow of which the reality is yet
to come. Life is all of a piece then and there's no shame in being
miserably human. As for my loneliness, it doesn't greatly matter; it is
the fault in part of my obstinacy. There have been times when I've been
frantically distressed and, to tell you the truth, wretchedly homesick,
because my maid--a