are, I feel that they are there. I feel that trivial things, words,
actions, looks are noted, commented upon, held to be significant.
If I am silent, I must be depressed; if I talk and smile, I am
making an effort to overcome my depression. It sounds unloving and
ungracious to resent this: but I don't undervalue the care and
tenderness that cause it; at the same time it adds to the strain by
imposing upon me a sort of vigilance, a constant effort to behave
normally. It is infinitely and deeply touching to feel love all
about me; but in such a state of mind as mine, one is shy of
emotion, one dreads it, one shuns it. I suppose it argues a want of
simplicity, of perfect manfulness, to feel this; but few or no
women can instinctively feel the difference. In a real and deep
affliction, one that could be frankly confessed, the more affection
and sympathy that one can have the better; it is the one thing that
sustains. But my unhappiness is not a real thing altogether, not a
FRANK thing; the best medicine for it is to think as little about
it; the only help one desires is the evidence that one does not
need sympathy; and sympathy only turns one's thoughts inwards, and
makes one feel that one is forlorn and desolate, when the only hope
is to feel neither.

At Hapton it was just the reverse; neither Musgrave nor the curate,
Templeton, troubled their head about my fancies. I don't imagine
that Musgrave noticed that anything was the matter with me. If I
was silent, he merely thought I had nothing to say; he took for
granted I was in my normal state, and the result was that I
temporarily recovered it.

Then, too, the kind of talk I got was a relief. With women, the
real talk is intime talk; the world of politics, books, men, facts,