with tears blistering her letter.

"I'm miserable, miserable," she wrote. "There doesn't seem to be
anything to live for. I suppose it's selfish and horrid to grumble
because Mother has married again, but why did she choose the very
moment when she was to take me into life? Oh, Alice, what am I to do? I
feel like a rabbit with its foot in a trap, listening to the traffic on
the main road--like a newly fledged bird brought down with a broken
wing among the dead leaves of Rip Van Winkle's sleeping-place. You'll
laugh when you read this, and say that I'm dramatizing my feelings and
writing for effect; but if you've got any heart at all, you'd cry if
you saw me (me of all girls!) buried alive out here without a single
soul to speak to who's as young as I am--hushed if I laugh by mistake,
scowled at if I let myself move quickly, catching old age every hour I
stay here."

"Why, Alice, just think of it! There's not a person or a thing in and
out of this house that's not old. I don't mean old as we thought of it
at school, thirty and thirty-five, but really and awfully old. The
house is the oldest for miles round. My grandfather is seventy-two, and
my grandmother's seventy. The servants are old, the trees are old, the
horses are old; and even the dogs lie about with dim eyes waiting for
death."

"When Mother was here, it was bearable. We escaped as often as we
could, and rode and drove and made secret visits to the city and saw
the plays at matinees. There's nothing old about Mother. I suppose
that's why she married again. But now that I'm left alone in this house
of decay, where everybody and everything belongs to the past, I'm
frightened of being so young, and catch looks that make me feel that I
ought to be ashamed of myself. It's so long since I quarreled with a
girl or flirted with a boy that I can't remember it. I'm forgetting how
to laugh. I'm beginning not to care about clothes or whether I look
nice."

"One day is exactly like another. I wander about aimlessly with nothing
to do, nowhere to go, no one to speak to. I've even begun to give up
reading novels, because they make me so jealous. It's all wrong, Alice.
It's bad and unhealthy. It puts mutinous thoughts into my head.
Honestly, the only way in which I can get the sort of thrill that I
ought to have now, if ever I am to thrill at all, is in making wild
plans of escape, so wild and so naughty that I don't think I'd better
write about them, even to you, dear."