cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the
question, 'Into how little space a human soul can be crushed?' I have seen
some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble,
and found room to move there--wide room. A woman who has been for many
years in one of those places carries the mark of the beast on her till she
dies, though she may expand a little afterward, when she breathes in the
free world."

"Were you miserable?" he asked, looking at her with quick anxiety.

"I?--no. I am never miserable and never happy. I wish I were. But I
should have run away from the place on the fourth day, and hired myself to
the first Boer-woman whose farm I came to, to make fire under her soap-pot,
if I had to live as the rest of the drove did. Can you form an idea,
Waldo, of what it must be to be shut up with cackling old women, who are
without knowledge of life, without love of the beautiful, without strength,
to have your soul cultured by them? It is suffocation only to breathe the
air they breathe; but I made them give me room. I told them I should
leave, and they knew I came there on my own account; so they gave me a
bedroom without the companionship of one of those things that were having
their brains slowly diluted and squeezed out of them. I did not learn
music, because I had no talent; and when the drove made cushions, and
hideous flowers that the roses laugh at, and a footstool in six weeks that
a machine would have made better in five minutes, I went to my room. With
the money saved from such work I bought books and newspapers, and at night
I sat up. I read, and epitomized what I read; and I found time to write
some plays, and find out how hard it is to make your thoughts look anything
but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink and paper. In the holidays
I learnt a great deal more. I made acquaintances, saw a few places and
many people, and some different ways of living, which is more than any