open one to-day, after a month's complete ignorance of all that had been
happening in the world, I saw the following headline: Suicide of a Lady
in a Lunatic Asylum.

And now I feel as shaken as though I had taken part in a crime; as
though I had had some share in this woman's death.

I am so far to blame that I abandoned her at a moment when it might
still have been possible to save her.... But this is a morbid notion! If
a person wants "to shuffle off this mortal coil" it is nobody's duty to
prevent her.

To me, Agatha Ussing's life or death are secondary matters; it is only
the circumstances that trouble me.

Was she mad, or no? Undoubtedly not more insane than the rest of us, but
her self-control snapped like a bowstring which is overstrained. She
saw--so she said--a grinning death's head behind every smiling face.
Merely a bee in her bonnet! But she was foolish enough to talk about it;
and when people laughed at her words with a good-natured contempt, her
glance became searching and fixed as though she was trying to convince
herself. Such an awful look of terror haunted her eyes, that at her gaze
a cold shiver, born of one's own fears and forebodings, ran through one.

She compelled us to realise the things we scarcely dare foresee....

I shall never forget a letter in which she wrote these words in a queer,
faltering handwriting:

"If men suspected what took place in a woman's inner life after forty,