My gay cousins, all of whom you know well—­the Wilber girls, Leta and Jennie, pretty little Lou Barton, and another set of Wilbers whom I think you do not know so well, who are married now—­my gay cousins, then, most of them beauties, all of them rich and fashionable, are somewhat ashamed of me, and have let me feel it in every petty way that we women know so well how to find.  I am ugly and poor, my earning my own living is a spot upon their gentility, and I have unfortunately, and quite against my will, more than once given them cause for serious annoyance and apprehension.  Then, one of our uncles, who is a bachelor and very rich, has insisted that I am never to be slighted—­always to be invited to everything in the shape of a party given by the family.  If it lay with me, of course I would never accept these invitations, but I have had it explained to me over and over again that my not doing so is visited upon the party-givers in one way or another by our masterful uncle Rufus.  So, occasionally, very much against my inclination, I leave my little third-story room, with its cozy fire and humble adornments, and sit in the corner of their great rooms, a “looker-on in Vienna” in every sense.

I have many kind friends:  it would be strange if in all these years I had not found some who did not care for outward advantages.  I have dreamed my sweet love-dream, and it is over, and the roses have grown above my buried hopes.

Since then I have let one idea fill my life to the exclusion of everything else, putting away from me all desires and thoughts of other needs; and that too has left me.  I call it an “idea” for lack of a better name.  I had put away all thought of marriage with my bright youth, but took into my heart instead what I deemed would serve as well—­a friendship for another woman.  For ten years we knew no separate life—­I thought no separate hopes.  She had loved, been on the eve of marriage, her lover had died:  that was her heart’s history, and henceforth the idea of love had fallen out of both our lives—­not the idea only, but the possibility of love.  I thought so—­she said so.

I trusted her and loved her with a perfect love.  I wound my hopes about her:  I gave up all my life to her as if she had been my lover.  I never cared to form other friendships.  I deprived myself of all possibilities of making other ties of any sort, and with the first opportunity she whistled me down the wind, and cared no more for me than if she had never professed to love me.  She had been my one bright thing—­she was sweet and winsome—­the one golden gleam in my sombre life.  My future was bound up in her so completely that when she severed the fine, close cords (brittle, yet so strong) which had bound us together for years, she cut into my heart—­nay more, wrested from me all my sweet trusts and faiths.  If she is false, who else in all God’s earth is true?  I pity myself very much.  You, of course, will not see why her marrying should make a