superiority was well-founded, and retired farther into my corner, for
the first time conscious of my shabbiness and lowliness.

I looked on at the dancing until I could endure it no longer. Overcome
by a sense of isolation and unfitness, I slipped out of the room,
avoiding the teacher's eye, and went home to write melancholy poetry.

What had come over me? Why was I, the confident, the ambitious,
suddenly grown so shy and meek? Why was the candidate for encyclopaedic
immortality overawed by a scarlet hood? Why did I, a very tomboy
yesterday, suddenly find my playmates stupid, and hide-and-seek a
bore? I did not know why. I only knew that I was lonely and troubled
and sore; and I went home to write sad poetry.

I shall never forget the pattern of the red carpet in our parlor,--we
had achieved a carpet since Chelsea days,--because I lay for hours
face down on the floor, writing poetry on a screechy slate. When I had
perfected my verses, and copied them fair on the famous blue-lined
note paper, and saw that I had made a very pathetic poem indeed, I
felt better. And this happened over and over again. I gave up the
dancing-club, I ceased to know the rowdy little boys, and I wrote
melancholy poetry oftener, and felt better. The centre table became my
study. I read much, and mooned between chapters, and wrote long
letters to Miss Dillingham.

For some time I wrote to her almost daily. That was when I found in my
heart such depths of woe as I could not pack into rhyme. And finally
there came a day when I could utter my trouble in neither verse nor
prose, and I implored Miss Dillingham to come to me and hear my
sorrowful revelations. But I did not want her to come to the house. In
the house there was no privacy; I could not talk. Would she meet me on
Boston Common at such and such a time?

Would she? She was a devoted friend, and a wise woman. She met me on
Boston Common. It was a gray autumn day--was it not actually
drizzling?--and I was cold sitting on the bench; but I was thrilled
through and through with the sense of the magnitude of my troubles,
and of the romantic nature of the rendezvous. Who that was even half
awake when he was growing up does not know what all these symptoms
betokened? Miss Dillingham understood, and she wisely gave me no
inkling of her diagnosis. She let me talk and kept a grave face. She
did not belittle my troubles--I made specific charges against my home,
members of my family, and life in gene