But what are the occasional visits of this life-consumer, this vampire that sucks out the blood, to his constant, never-failing presence?  There are those who feel within themselves the power of living fullest lives, of sounding every chord of the full diapason of passion and feeling, yet who have been so hemmed around, so shut in by adverse and narrowing circumstances, that never, no, not once in their half-century of years which stretch from childhood to old age, have they been free to breathe out, to speak aloud the heart that was in them.  Ever the same wasting indifference to the things that are, the same ill-repressed longing for the things that might be.  Long days of wearisome repetition of duties in which there is no life, followed by restless nights, when Imagination seizes the reins in her own hands, and paints the out-blossoming of those germs of happiness and fulness of being of whose existence within us we carry about always the aching consciousness.

And such things I have known from the moment when I first stepped from babyhood into childhood, from the time when life ceased to be a play and came to have its duties and its sufferings.  Always the haunting sense of a happiness which I was capable of feeling, faint glimpses of a paradise of which I was a born denizen,—­and always, too, the stern knowledge of the restraints which held me prisoner, the idle longings of an exile.  But would no strong effort of will, no energy of heart or mind, break the bonds that held me down,—­no steady perseverance of purpose win me a way out of darkness into light?  No, for I was a woman, an ugly woman, whose girlhood had gone by without affection, and whose womanhood was passing without love,—­a woman, poor and dependent on others for daily bread, and yet so bound by conventional duties to those around her that to break from them into independence would be to outrage all the prejudices of those who made her world.

I could plan such escape from my daily and yearly narrowing life, could dream of myself walking steadfast and unshaken through labor to independence, could picture a life where, if the heart were not fed, at least the tastes might be satisfied, could strengthen myself through all the imaginary details of my going-forth from the narrow surroundings which made my prison-walls; but when the time came to take the first step, my courage failed.  I could not go out into that world which looked to me so wide and lonely; the necessity for love was too strong for me, I must dwell among mine own people.  There, at least, was the bond of custom, there was the affection which grows out of habit; but in the world what hope had I to win love from strangers, with my repellent looks, awkward movements, and want of personal attractions?