ore can a young life want to stay its uncertain steps?

2

From that moment, I see her delicate profile stand out against a
background of pain and sorrow, like a lovely cameo whose dainty
workmanship has been obliterated by the hand of time. Moral suffering
can refine and accentuate the character of a beautiful face, is indeed
nearly always kind to it. But here the mental distress was only the
feeble reflection of a crushing and deadening material torture. In the
evenings, when the hour of rest came at last, Rose, exhausted, accepted
it dully; her whole body called for oblivion; her heavy eyelids drooped;
and her submerged wretchedness had no time for tears.

How could the poor girl make any resistance? Her environment was too
hostile, her disposition too gentle and the task laid upon her too
oppressive.

The very look of her diary, during those Sainte-Colombe days, tells us
her story far better than the words which it contains. The first few
pages are filled with wild and incoherent sentences. There are passages
that can scarcely be deciphered and others blotted with tears. Her
suffering is not sufficiently well-expressed for it to be understood and
more or less identified, but it can be felt and divined: it is a
landscape of pain, it is the sight of an inner life which has received a
grievous wound and whose blood is gushing forth in torrents.

And then hope is exhausted drop by drop; and with it go anger and
resistance. Everything goes under, grows still and silent. For months,
Rose hardly touches her diary: here and there, scattered on pages
bearing no date, are occasional melancholy reflections, the last
flickers of an expiring consciousness....

It is then, no doubt, that one day she flies to death for deliverance.
She is saved, but for a long time remains ill and weak. When she
recovers her health, her spirit is finally broken. In silence and gloom,
she drowns all feeling in work too heavy for her strength.

3

In the district they blame this young girl who, after receiving a good
education, has acquiesced in this miserable existence. And yet I find a
thousand reasons which explain her conduct and cannot find one for
condemning it. Rose's soul is still in the chrysalis-stage. Ignorant of
her own strength and qualities, how could she make use of them?

Is not this the case with most young girls? If our moral transformations
could bring about physical changes, if a woman, like a butterfly, had to
pas