I rather wish Torp had less “style,” as she calls it.  Undoubtedly she has lived in large establishments and has picked up some habits and customs from each of them.  She is welcome to wait at table in white cotton gloves and to perch a huge silk bow on her hair, which is redolent of the kitchen, but when it comes to trimming her poor work-worn nails to the fashionable pyramidal shape—­she really becomes tragic.

She “romanticises” everything.  I should not be at all surprised if some day she decked her kitchen range with wreaths of roses and hung up works of art between the stewpans.

I am really glad I did not bring Samuel the footman with me.  He could not have waited on me better than Jeanne, and at any rate I am free from his eyes, which, in spite of all their respectful looks, always reminded me of a fly-paper full of dead and dying flies.

Jeanne’s look has a something gliding and subtle about it that keeps me company like a witty conversation.  It is really on her account that I dress myself well.  But I cannot converse with her.  I should not like to try, and then to be disillusioned.

Men have often assured me that I was the only woman they could talk with as though I were one of themselves.  Personally I never feel at one with menkind.  I only understand and admire my own sex.

In reality I think there is more difference between a man and a woman than between an inert stone and a growing plant.  I say this ...  I who ...

* * * * *

What business is it of mine?  We were not really friends.  The fact of her having confided in me makes no demands on my feelings.  If this thing had happened five years ago, I should have taken it as a rather welcome sensation—­nothing more.  Or had I read in the paper “On the—­inst., of heart disease, or typhoid fever,” my peace of mind would not have been disturbed for an hour.

I have purposely refrained from reading the papers lately.  Chancing to open one to-day, after a month’s complete ignorance of all that had been happening in the world, I saw the following headline:  Suicide of a Lady in a Lunatic Asylum.

And now I feel as shaken as though I had taken part in a crime; as though I had had some share in this woman’s death.

I am so far to blame that I abandoned her at a moment when it might still have been possible to save her....  But this is a morbid notion!  If a person wants “to shuffle off this mortal coil” it is nobody’s duty to prevent her.

To me, Agatha Ussing’s life or death are secondary matters; it is only the circumstances that trouble me.

Was she mad, or no?  Undoubtedly not more insane than the rest of us, but her self-control snapped like a bowstring which is overstrained.  She saw—­so she said—­a grinning death’s head behind every smiling face.  Merely a bee in her bonnet!  But she was foolish enough to talk about it; and when people laughed at her words with a good-natured contempt, her glance became searching and fixed as though she was trying to convince herself.  Such an awful look of terror haunted her eyes, that at her gaze a cold shiver, born of one’s own fears and forebodings, ran through one.