. Thinking of the day when she had given it up, she
remembered it with a vague consciousness of having fought a deadly
struggle with her fate, and that she had been conquered,--never had
lived again. Let it be; she could not bear the struggle again.

She went on dressing herself in a dreary, mechanical way. Once, a
bitter laugh came on her face, as she looked into the glass, and saw
the dead, dull eyes, and the wrinkle on her forehead. Was that the face
to be crowned with delicate caresses and love? She scorned herself for
the moment, grew sick of herself, balked, thwarted in her true life as
she was. Other women whom God has loved enough to probe to the depths
of their nature have done the same,--saw themselves as others saw them:
their strength drying up within them, jeered at, utterly alone. It is
a trial we laugh at. I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter
subjects for laughter than the slow gnawing hunger in the heart of many
a slighted woman or a selfish man. They come out of the trial as out
of martyrdom, according to their faith: you see its marks sometimes in
a frivolous old age going down with tawdry hopes and starved eyes to
the grave; you see its victory in the freshest, fullest lives in the
earth. This woman had accepted her trial, but she took it up as an
inflexible fate which she did not understand; it was new to her; its
solitude, its hopeless thirst were freshly bitter. She loathed herself
as one whom God had thought unworthy of every woman's right,--to love
and be loved.

She went to the window, looking blankly out into the gray cold. Any one
with keen analytic eye, noting the thin muscles of this woman, the
protruding brain, the eyes deep, concealing, would have foretold that
she would conquer in the fight; force her soul down,--but that the
forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid body spent and dead. One
thing was certain: no curious eyes would see the struggle; the body
might be nerveless or sickly, but it had the great power of reticence;
the calm with which she faced the closest gaze was natural to her,--no
mask. When she left her room and went down, the same unaltered quiet
that had baffled Knowles steadied her step and cooled her eyes.

After you have made a sacrifice of yourself for others, did you ever
notice how apt you were to doubt, as soon as the deed was irrevocable,
whether, after all, it were worth while to have done it? How mean
seems the good gained! How ne