"I gave up reading books and even newspapers; partly I suppose because I had for the time satiated myself, especially with sentimental and trashy novels, and had not yet learned to know real literature, and partly because, in my state of humility, I listened to my mistress when she said reading took too much time, that it was better to sew, dust, and the like, when I was not busy with the children. Everything I do, I must do passionately, it seems, even to being a slave. I gave up dances, too, and on my days out dutifully visited my parents. I had no friends or companions and was in all respects what one calls a perfect servant--so perfect that the friends of my mistress quite envied her the possession of so useful a slave. "I got pleasure out of doing the thing so thoroughly; but yet it would not have been so interesting to me if it had not been painful, too. I was enough of a sport to want as much depth of experience, while it lasted, in that direction as in any other--in spite of, perhaps partly because of, the pain. And what pain it was, at times! Who knows of the bitter hatred surging in my heart, of the long nights spent in tears, of the terrible mental tortures I endured! Sometimes it was as if an iron hand were squeezing my heart so that I almost died; sometimes as if a great lump of stone lay on my chest. And my mistress seemed each day somehow to make the iron hand squeeze tighter and tighter and the stone weigh heavier and heavier. If she had only known what a deadly hatred I bore her--a hatred that would not have been so severe if I had not been so good a servant--had given myself rope, had satisfied my emotions! If she had understood that my calm, modest bearing was only a mask which hid a passionate soul keenly alive to the suffering inflicted on me, she would have hesitated, I think, before she entrusted her precious darlings to my care. "This period of virtuous serving was the severest strain to which my nature, physical and moral, was ever put. I finally became very ill, and had to be removed to my mother's house, as completely broken in body as I had apparently been in spirit. * * * * * "I sat near the window gazing vacantly at the scene below. All the morning I had sat there with that empty feeling in my soul. From time to time my mother spoke to me, but I answered without turning my head. Since my illness I seemed to have lost all interest in life, and this, although everybody was kind to me. My mother gave me novels to read and money to go to the dances. The books I scarcely glanced at, and what I did read seemed so silly to me! And the dances had lost their charm. I went once or twice, but the music did not awaken any emotion in me, and I sat dully in a corner watching, without any desire to join in. And this, when I was hardly past sixteen years of age!