forlorn artist has to throw all the liveliness, all the emotion, all the
graces of style she is mistress of, for the wages of a maid of all work,
and no more recognition or thanks from anybody than the apprentice who
sets the types for the paper that prints her ever-ending and
ever-beginning stories. And yet she has a pretty talent, sensibility, a
natural way of writing, an ear for the music of verse, in which she
sometimes indulges to vary the dead monotony of everlasting narrative,
and a sufficient amount of invention to make her stories readable. I
have found my eyes dimmed over them oftener than once, more with thinking
about her, perhaps, than about her heroes and heroines. Poor little
body! Poor little mind! Poor little soul! She is one of that great
company of delicate, intelligent, emotional young creatures, who are
waiting, like that sail I spoke of, for some breath of heaven to fill
their white bosoms,--love, the right of every woman; religious emotion,
sister of love, with the same passionate eyes, but cold, thin, bloodless
hands,--some enthusiasm of humanity or divinity; and find that life
offers them, instead, a seat on a wooden bench, a chain to fasten them to
it, and a heavy oar to pull day and night. We read the Arabian tales and
pity the doomed lady who must amuse her lord and master from day to day
or have her head cut off; how much better is a mouth without bread to
fill it than no mouth at all to fill, because no head? We have all round
us a weary-eyed company of Scheherezades! This is one of them, and I may
call her by that name when it pleases me to do so.

The next boarder I have to mention is the one who sits between the Young
Girl and the Landlady. In a little chamber into which a small thread of
sunshine finds its way for half an hour or so every day during a month or
six weeks of the spring or autumn, at all other times obliged to content
itself with ungilded daylight, lives this boarder, whom, without wronging
any others of our company, I may call, as she is very generally called in