he had never known
one for whose sake she would have thought it worth while to give
herself so much trouble. When she observed her face in the mirror, and
could not help finding it beautiful, it afforded her just as little
pleasure as if--like a female Robinson Crusoe on some island in the
ocean--she had seen her reflection in clear water, and had known by it
that she was queen of the wilderness. In the next room sat the poor
madwoman, in her arm-chair, and nodded at the beautiful daughter, whom
she was robbing of life, with an idiotic smile. Of what avail was her
beauty against this inexorable fate?

Sometimes indeed, in the spring nights, between dreaming and waking, or
when she read some beautiful moving story, it seemed to her as if the
frost that had settled about her heart were bursting, as if a secret
longing for something sweet and precious swelled her bosom, a trembling
desire for some unknown, unattainable happiness. But this feeling never
took the shape of a being who should strive to gain her love, and whom
she might love in return. At such times she dreamed of nothing better
than to have the liberty of belonging to herself, of being freed from
that horrible duty which, to be sure, had grown less hard through
custom, and which no longer awakened even a shudder, but which held her
a prisoner daily and hourly. If these chains only fell from her--would
she then be so unwise as to voluntarily submit herself to a new form of
restraint?

But by this time she had enjoyed her freedom long enough to have been
sometimes forced to admit, with a quiet sigh, that the longed-for
happiness was not so overpowering that it relieved the soul of all
other desires. What she really did want she did not know. She fancied
that, if she only had a talent of some sort, it would fill this
yearning emptiness within her. Since she believed it to be too late for
her to take up music or drawing, she hit upon the idea of writing down
her thoughts and moods in free rhythmic forms of her own invention.
These were by no means the usual imitations of well-known lyric poets,
in the conventional and occasionally much-abused metres and stanzas.
What she wrote in her secret diary bore about the same relation to this
conventional poetry that the play of the wind upon an AEolian harp does
to a sonnet. But for all that it was an unspeakable comfort to her,
when she felt that she was striking melodious chords within her lonely
soul, to listen to the