love in my life. I have only a barren waste to show. It is as if I had
started from a lovely, radiant garden in the fair morning of my life, in
which I had left the bright, sweet rose of my love, and walking along a
narrow, dark path, had clasped hands with, and drawn my light and warmth
from, a figure walking close beside me; and though from all sides as I
walked forms had come to me, offering me fair fruits and sweet flowers, I
declined them all without ever a word of thanks, being so content with my
one companion. And suddenly, when all my youth, all my prospects of other
things, had gone, this idealized one had withdrawn its hand-clasp, and
turning on me a face I did not know, faded into darkness, leaving me
nothing but my broken hopes, a wreath of withered flowers,

"Tangled down in chains about my feet."

You do not of course realize how the old French _émigré_ blood in my
veins, inherited from my father, makes this a very vital matter to me. We
cling to our hopes very tenaciously while they abide--then we are
distraught. We loved, my father and I, very few, but those with a clinging
oneness that is wellnigh pain: he loved my mother and myself--that was
all. Likewise I had my two: they having failed me, my life is a blank. I
have heard of empty-hearted people: I know now what the phrase means. I am
empty-hearted: I have not one hope, one particle of faith, one real,
honest desire, except to "drie my weir," as the Scotch say, doing my duty
as best I may, as it comes to me. But I have a woman's hatred of pity: my
cousins have long accorded me a contemptuous pity for being an old maid. I
laughed their pity to scorn while I had Esther Hooper. What more did I
need? We could enact over again the sweet old life of the Ladies of
Llangollen.

We had planned our lives a thousand times. Poor we both were, yet we would