wickedness; we all had difficulties of the same kind, and we couldn't expect to do more than just get along somehow as well as we could. I was angry with Fate that such a harmonious being had been made to jar with so heavy a strain. She had been free, and now she was to be confounded and brought to doubt. I don't think I can express it in words; but I feel as if I really understood why she killed herself a few days later. She had come among us, a wonder, ignoring the littlenesses of life, or else making them worthy by the spirit in which she treated them, and the first strain of this dragging ordinary affliction bewildered her. Whether a little more experience would have saved her, or whether it was a superior flash of insight which prompted her to end her life—at any rate it wasn't merely unreturned love which oppressed her."
"And what was the man like?"
"He was quite a boy, and never knew she was in love with him; in fact I can't tell how far she did love him. The older I grow the more certain I feel that this actual love wasn't deep; but it was the sudden revelation of a whole mystery, a new set of difficulties, which confounded an understanding so far-reaching and superior. I remember her room distinctly; she was unlike most women in this respect, she had no desire to furnish her own room and be surrounded by pretty things of her own choice. She left the room just as it was when the family took the furnished house, with its very common ugly furniture, vile pictures on the walls, and things under glasses. She carried so much beauty with her, she didn't think her room worth troubling about. I always imagine that her room has never been entered or changed since her death: nothing stirs there, except in the summer a band of small flies dance their mazy quadrille at the centre of the ceiling. I remember how she used to lie on the sofa and wonder at them with her half-laughing, half-pathetic eyes."
