men universally agree is that we come into the
world alone and we go out of the world alone; and although we travel in
company, make our pilgrimage to Canterbury or to Vanity Fair in a great
show of fellowship, and of bearing one another's burdens, we carry our
deepest troubles alone. When we think of it, it is an awful lonesomeness
in this animated and moving crowd. Each one either must or will carry
his own burden, which he commonly cannot, or by pride or shame will not,
ask help in carrying.

Henderson drew more and more apart from confidences, and was alone in
building up the colossal structure of his wealth. Father Damon was
carrying his renewed temptation alone, after all his brave confession and
attempt at renunciation. Ruth Leigh plodded along alone, with her secret
which was the joy and the despair of her life--the opening of a gate into
the paradise which she could never enter. Jack Delancy, the confiding,
open-hearted good fellow, had come to a stage in his journey where he
also was alone. Not even to Carmen could he confess the extent of his
embarrassments, nor even in her company, nor in the distraction of his
increasingly dissipated life, could he forget them. Not only had his
investments been all transferred to his speculations, but his home had
been mortgaged, and he did not dare tell Edith of the lowering cloud that
hung over it; and that his sole dependence was the confidence of the
Street, which any rumor might shatter, in that one of Henderson's schemes
to which he had committed himself. Edith, the one person who could have
comforted him, was the last person to whom he could have told this, for
he had the most elementary, and the common conception of what marriage
is.

But Edith's lot was the most pitiful of all. She was not only alone, but
compelled to inaction. She saw the fair fabric of her life dissolving,
and neither by cries nor tears, by appeals nor protest, by show of anger
nor by show of suffering, could she hinder the dissolution. Strong in
herself and full of courage, day by day and week by week she felt her
powerlessness. Heaven knows what it cost her--what it costs all women in
like circumstances--to be always cheerful, never to show distrust. If
her love were not enough, if her attractions were not enough, there was
no human help to which she could appeal.

And what, pray, was there to appeal? There was no visible neglect, no
sufficient alienation for gossip to take hold of. If there