“Oh, my father, my father! There is no man in the world like you, none that knows me, that loves me as you do! If you only knew how my heart yearns every moment for you! Why could not this man have the least of your qualities,--your iron will, your scorn of weak things in human nature, your dominating, achieving power It is in comparing this man with you that I find him so small, so pusillanimous, so different from the standard of manhood that you have made me adopt, so different from me, so infinitely far from me. It is good that it is so, but it makes me lonely beyond all expression. I would rather be alone in a desert than with this strange mirage of a man, this male with an infinite capacity for the little things that only little women are suited to do. He tortures me with his goodness, his self-sacrifice to me, his making me feel that he lives only to make me comfortable and bring me back to health. Where are you, my father? I know that you will come to me when you can. That much I know, I know! Come, father, and take me from this awful prison!... “I think I have done remarkably well to be as patient as I have been. This horrid food is enough to kill a healthy woman,--tinned meats and vegetables, tinned everything, and hardly any flour, but sea-biscuits instead! Of course my poor slave does his best to prepare things in such a way that it will be possible for me to eat them, for he seems to realize that I am a human being.... “I am determined to bring this man to an acquaintance with his tongue. The loneliness that I feel is unbearable. He must be as lonely as I, and, like me, he is probably too proud to make a sign. Of course he talks to me now when I make him, but about things in Asia or Africa that I am certain are as dull to him as to me. He is maintaining this distance, I am certain, just to guard his history and true character, and to keep me in a position where it will remain impossible for me to find out what is going forward on the other side of that door. I will talk to him about myself; that will compel him to talk about himself. I can’t bear this isolation. It is inhuman. And I have no fears that he will presume. They passed long ago.