touched the bottom. How could I tell? Perhaps the same horrible
temptation would beset me, again and again, deepening into a
despairing purpose; the fertile mind built up rapidly a dreadful
vista of possibilities, terrible facts that might have to be faced.
Even so the dark mood beckoned me again; better to end it, said a
hollow voice, better to let your dear ones suffer the worst, with a
sorrow that will lessen year by year, than sink into a broken
shadowed life of separation and restraint--but again it passed;
again a grim resolution came to my aid.

Then, as we sped homewards in the speeding train, there came over
me another thought. Here was I, who had lightly trafficked with
human emotions, who had written with a romantic glow of the dark
things of life, despair, agony, thoughts of self-destruction,
insane fears, here was I at last confronted with them. I could
never dare, I felt, to speak of such things again; were such dark
mysteries to be used to heighten the sense of security and joy, to
give a trivial reader a thrill of pleasure, a sympathetic reader a
thrill of luxurious emotion? No, there was nothing uplifting or
romantic about them when they came; they were dark as the grave,
cold as the underlying clay. What a vile and loathsome profanation,
deserving indeed of a grim punishment, to make a picturesque
background out of such things! At length I had had my bitter taste
of grief, and drew in to my trembling spirit the shuddering chill
of despair. I had stepped, like the light-hearted maiden of the old
story, within the forbidden door, and the ugly, the ghastly reality
of the place had burst upon me, the huddled bodies, the basin
filled with blood. One had read in books of men and women whose
life had been suddenly curdled into slow miseries. One had half
blamed them in one's thought; one had felt that any experience,