So this is what comes of thinking life such a grand and pleasant thing, and this world such a lovely, satisfying paradise!  Wait long enough—­(I have not had to wait very long for my part)—­and every sweet thing turns to gall-like bitterness between one’s teeth!  The experience of a few days ago might have taught me that, one would think, but I was dull to thick-headedness.  I required two lessons—­the second, oh how far harsher than even the first!

In a moment I have taken my resolution.  I am racing up-stairs.  I have reached my room.  I do not summon my maid.  One requires no assistance to enable one to unbuild, deface, destroy.  In a second—­in much less time than it takes me to write it—­I have torn off the mob-cap, and thrown it on the floor.  If I had done what I wished, if I had yielded to my first impulse, I should also have trampled upon it; but from the extremity of petulance, I am proud to be able to tell you that I refrain.  With rapid fingers I unbutton my blue-velvet gown, and step out of it, leaving it in a costly heap on the floor.  Then I open the high folding-doors of the wardrobe, and run my eye over its contents; but the most becoming is no longer what I seek.  For a moment or two I stand undecided, then my eye is caught by a venerable garment, loathly and ill-made, which I had before I married, and have since kept, more as a relic than any thing else—­a gown of that peculiar shade of sallow, bilious, Bismarck brown, which is the most trying to the paleness of my skin.  Before any one could say “Jack Robinson,” it is down, and I am in it.  Then, without even a parting smooth to the hair, which the violent off-tearing of my cap must have roughened and disheveled, I go down-stairs and reenter the boudoir.  As I do so, I catch an accidental glimpse of myself in a glass.  Good Heavens!  Can three minutes (for I really have not been longer about it) have wrought such a monstrous metamorphosis?  Is every woman as utterly dependent for her charms upon her husk as I am?  Can this sad, sallow slip of a girl be the beaming, shapely, British matron I contemplated with so innocently pleased an eye half an hour ago?  If, in all my designs, I could have the perfect success which has crowned my efforts at self-disfigurement, I should be among the most prosperous of my species.

I sit down as far from the window as the dimensions of the room will allow, call Vick, who comes at first sneakingly and doubtful of her reception, up on my lap, and take a book.  It is the one nearest to my hand, and I plunge into it haphazard in the middle.

This is the sentence that first greets me:  “Her whole heart was in her boy.  She often feared that she loved him too much—­more than God himself—­yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened.”

Not a very difficult one to construe, is it? and yet, having come to the end, and found that it conveyed no glimmering of an idea to my mind, I begin it over again.