you, you fiend, waked me up; and may your soul be thrice cursed if
you have only pulled the doll to pieces _to see what it was made
of!_ Know, you that have a soul which says it lives and
suffers--that I can't go to sleep again! There is no joy for me in
mother or father, in friends or admiration--I can tolerate nothing
that I tolerated before you came with your cursed or blessed fire!

Also, if you do not marry me, or if I do not find some man who has
your strength and desire for life, and who will take me and help me
to learn, I shall die without having lived.--And I cried out in
misery--only forty-two years, only forty-two little years, and I
shall be an old woman of sixty! Only forty-two years in which to
learn to live!

I believe if I had you here now I could almost strangle you. We may
kill each other some day. I sometimes feel that there is nothing
that will give me any relief, that I cannot breathe, I cannot
support my body. But these are foolish and unprofitable
feelings--and I believe I will yet be saved, if not by you, perhaps
by myself. I think some heavenly aid came to me to-day. I asked for
it, I simply said it _must_ come--and now I am able to bear myself
and look around me, and say that the secret of my liberation is not
death but life.

Please realize, Thyrsis, that I know you do not need me, that I
cannot either entertain you or help you. My dear, do you not know
that I have been conscious of this from the very beginning--and it
has been this thought that has often made me worry, and doubt, and
question. And then I have told myself that you had found _something_
in me to love; and that I also was very hungry to know about life