Makes awful lightning.
--MRS. BROWNING.

I had just come in from the street. I had a letter in my hand. It
was for my fellow-lodger, a young girl who taught in the High
School, and whom I had persuaded to share my room because of her
pretty face and quiet ways. She was not at home, and I flung the
letter down on the table, where it fell, address downwards. I
thought no more of it; my mind was too full, my heart too heavy with
my own trouble.

Going to the window, I leaned my cheek against the pane. Oh, the
deep sadness of a solitary woman's life! The sense of helplessness
that comes upon her when every effort made, every possibility
sounded, she realizes that the world has no place for her, and that
she must either stoop to ask the assistance of friends or starve! I
have no words for the misery I felt, for I am a proud woman,
and----But no lifting of the curtain that shrouds my past. It has fallen
for ever, and for you and me and the world I am simply Constance
Sterling, a young woman of twenty-five, without home, relatives, or
means of support, having in her pocket seventy-five cents of change,
and in her breast a heart like lead, so utterly had every hope
vanished in the day's rush of disappointments.

How long I stood with my face to the window I cannot say. With eyes
dully fixed upon the blank walls of the cottages opposite, I stood
oblivious to all about me till the fading sunlight--or was it some
stir in the room behind me?--recalled me to myself, and I turned to
find my pretty room-mate staring at me with a troubled look that for
a moment made me forget my own sorrows and anxieties.