r to
have been born than I was for the first five and twenty years of my
life. I was full of hope and I was full, I suppose, of vanity and rash
confidence. I thought I was walking on solid earth with my head reaching
up to the clouds, and that sea and sky and all mankind were mine for the
smiling. And I am nothing and worse than nothing, I am the ineffectual
mother of two children, a daughter whom I adore--but of her I may not
tell you--and a son,--a son who is too like his father for any fury of
worship, a stolid little creature.... That is all I have done in the
world, a mere blink of maternity, and my blue Persian who is scarcely
two years old, has already had nine kittens. My husband and I have never
forgiven each other the indefinable wrong of not pleasing each other;
that embitters more and more; to take it out of each other is our role;
I have done my duty to the great new line of Justin by giving it the
heir it needed, and now a polite and silent separation has fallen
between us. We hardly speak except in company. I have not been so much
married, Stephen, I find, as collected, and since our tragic
misadventure--but there were beautiful moments, Stephen, unforgettable
glimpses of beauty in that--thank God, I say impenitently for that--the
door of the expensively splendid cabinet that contains me, when it is
not locked, is very discreetly--watched. I have no men friends, no
social force, no freedom to take my line. My husband is my official
obstacle. We barb the limitations of life for one another. A little
while ago he sought to chasten me--to rouse me rather--through jealousy,
and made me aware indirectly but a little defiantly of a young person of
artistic gifts in whose dramatic career he was pretending a conspicuous
interest. I was jealous and roused, but scarcely in the way he desired.
'This,' I said quite cheerfully, 'means freedom for _me_, Justin,'--and
the young woman vanished from the visible universe with an incredible
celerity. I hope she was properly paid off and not simply made away with
by a minion, but I become more and more aware of my ignorance of a
great financier's methods as I become more and more aware of them....

"Stephen, my dear, my brother, I am intolerably unhappy. I do not know
what to do with myself, or what there is to hope for in life. I am like
a prisoner in a magic cage and I do not know the word that will release
me. How is it with you? Are you unhappy beyond measure or are you n