A few of the pages of this journal, which I copy word for word from the manuscript lying before me, I give the reader.  Call the dead writer an egotist, if you will:  wonder at Callender’s love for this self-centred nature; I think she was an artist, and as an artist, her experience is of value to art.

“December—­18—.

“I have just torn out some pages written a year or so ago.  A diary of the introspective type is doubtless a pandering to egotism, but I have always detested that affectation which ignores the fact that each person is to him or herself the most interesting soul—­yes, and body—­in the universe, and now there is nothing of such infinite importance to me as this.  I fear I shall never write again.  All thought or plan, in prose or verse, seems dead in me:  broken images and pictures that are wildly disconnected float through my tired mind.  I have driven myself all day.  I have been seated at my desk, with my pen in my hand, looking blankly at the paper.  No words, no words!  Just before my first book went to press, I overworked.  I was in a fever; poems, similes, ran through my excited hours.  I could not write fast enough.  In that mental debauch I believe that I squandered the energy of years, and now I can conceive no more.  If I could only sleep, perhaps I could write.  Oh! long, long nights, crowded with the fearful acceleration of trival thoughts crushed one upon another, crowding so fast.  ‘My God,’ I pray, ’Let me sleep, only sleep,’ and conquered by this abject need, this weariness unutterable, I am fain to believe that this gift, common to the brute and slave, is better than anything my mind can gain for me, and there is nothing so entirely desirable in all the world as a few hours’ oblivion.

What a dream came to me this Autumn!  The doctor had given me an opiate.  At first it had no effect.  I tossed as restlessly as before on my hard bed, sighing vainly for the sleep that refused to come.  The noises in the street vexed me.  The light from an opposite window disturbed my tired eyes.  At last, I slept.  Oh! the glow, the radiance unspeakable of that dream!  I was in a long, low room.  A fire leaped on the hearth, as though it bore a charmed life.  Upon the floor was laid a crimson carpet.  There were great piles of crimson mattresses and cushions about the room, the ceiling was covered with a canopy of red silk, drawn to a centre, whence depended a lantern, filling the room with a soft rosy twilight.  The mantel was a bank of blood-red roses, and they also bloomed and died a fragant death in great bowls set here and there about the floor.  And in the centre of this glowing, amorous room was a great couch of red cushions, and I saw myself there, in the scented warmth, one elbow plunged in the cushions, with a certain expectation in my face.  It was very quiet.  Far down an echoing, distant corridor I heard footsteps, and I smiled and pushed the roses about with my foot, for I was waiting, and I knew that soft foot-fall drawing nearer, nearer.  My heart filled the silence with its beating.  I looked about the room.  Was it ready?  Yes, all was ready.  The very flowers were waiting to be crushed by his careless feet.  The fire had died to a steady ardent glow.  How close the steps were drawing!  A moment more—­