Produced by Robert Fite, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team, from imagesgenerously made available by the Canadian Institute forHistorical Microreproductions.
* * * * *
Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning.
—MRS. BROWNING.
I had just come in from the street. I had a letter in my hand. It wasfor my fellow-lodger, a young girl who taught in the High School, andwhom I had persuaded to share my room because of her pretty face andquiet ways. She was not at home, and I flung the letter down on thetable, where it fell, address downwards. I thought no more of it; mymind was too full, my heart too heavy with my own trouble.
Going to the window, I leaned my cheek against the pane. Oh, the deepsadness of a solitary woman's life! The sense of helplessness thatcomes upon her when every effort made, every possibility sounded, sherealizes that the world has no place for her, and that she must eitherstoop to ask the assistance of friends or starve! I have no words forthe misery I felt, for I am a proud woman, and——But no lifting of thecurtain that shrouds my past. It has fallen for ever, and for you andme and the world I am simply Constance Sterling, a young woman oftwenty-five, without home, relatives, or means of support, having inher pocket seventy-five cents of change, and in her breast a heart likelead, so utterly had every hope vanished in the day's rush ofdisappointments.
How long I stood with my face to the window I cannot say. With eyesdully fixed upon the blank walls of the cottages opposite, I stoodoblivious to all about me till the fading sunlight—or was it some stirin the room behind me?—recalled me to myself, and I turned to find mypretty room-mate staring at me with a troubled look that for a momentmade me forget my own sorrows and anxieties.
"What is it?" I ask