aims in life.

Of one of these dark hours Margaret's journal gives a vivid description,
from which some passages may be quoted. The occasion was a New England
Thanksgiving, a day on which her attendance at church was almost
compulsory. This church was not to her a spiritual home, and on the day
now spoken of the song of thanksgiving made positive discord in her
ears. She felt herself in no condition to give thanks. Her feet were
entangled in the problem of life. Her soul was agonized by its
unreconciled contradictions.

"I was wearied out with mental conflicts. I felt within myself great
power and generosity and tenderness; but it seemed to me as if they were
all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used
in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future
hopeless; yet I could not remember ever voluntarily to have done a wrong
thing, and my aspiration seemed very high."

Looking about in the church, she envied the little children for their
sense of dependence and protection. She knew not, she says, "that none
could have any father but God," knew not that she was "not the only
lonely one, the selected OEdipus, the special victim of an iron law."

From this intense and exaggerated self-consciousness, the only escape
was in fleeing from self. She sought to do this, as she had often done,
by a long quick walk, whose fatigue should weary out her anguish, and
enable her to return home "in a state of prayer." On this day this
resource did not avail her.

"All seemed to have reached its height. It seemed as if I could never
return to a world in which I had no place, to the mockery of humanities.
I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer."

The aspect of the outer world was in correspondence with these
depressing thoughts.

"It was a sad and sallow day of the late autumn. Slow processions of
clouds were passing over a cold blue sky; the hues of earth were dull
and gray and brown, with sickly struggles of late green here and there.
Sometimes a moaning gust of wind drove late, reluctant leaves across the
path--there was no life else." Driven from place to place by the
conflict within her, she sat down at last to rest "where the trees were
thick about a little pool, dark and silent. All was dark, and cold, and
still." Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds "with that transparent
sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when
it has been unkind