I went to the theatre that night alone, and everybody stared at me. I was beautiful then, I am nearly as beautiful now, but it was only on that night that I first fully recognised how beautiful I was, I could see it in the faces of the men who looked at me, and in the manner of the women,--how women hate one another! and yet some women have been very good to me. Well, when I got home I found supper waiting for me, and after supper I looked at myself again in the long pier glass opposite the fireplace; then a strange feeling came over me that I had never felt before, I felt a thirst to be admired, I say thirst, for it was so, it was really in the back of my throat that this feeling came, but it was in my head as well; it was not the admiration of ordinary people that I wanted; I craved to see some being as lovely as myself turn its head to gaze at me. Oh! my beautiful face, how I loved you, oh! the nights I have woken up shivering to think of the dissecting rooms where they take the bodies of the people who have no friends. At the end of six months my two hundred pounds were nearly gone. I lived innocently, I lived in a kind of dream. Men filled me with a kind of horror, when they looked at me in the streets I shuddered; I shudder still, and I wonder why God ever made such a blind and cruel thing as man. I moved into furnished rooms: all this is misty now in my mind. If I had died then I might never have gone to heaven, but I would never have seen hell. I got typhoid fever; my rings lay on the dressing table, hoops of sapphires and emeralds; each fortnight a ring went to pay for my rooms and the doctor, who seemed never able to cure me. I cannot tell you much after this, I can only say that I struggled, mad with pride and mad with hatred. I starved, but why should I pain you, and make more sad a story that is already sad enough? CHAPTER II JAMES WILDER It is about six months ago. I was in a very bad way. I was walking along the south side of Russell Square one day--the 17th of September I remember now--and thinking to myself how I should pay my landlady the three weeks' rent owing to her. Deeply as I was trying to think I could not help noticing a man coming towards me, striding along with his hat tilted back from his forehead, his head in the air, and looking just like a person walking in his sleep. I made way to let him pass, then suddenly I felt him grasp me by the arm and I heard him say "Ah!" I knew at once--how shall I put it--that he only wanted to speak to me, that he had mistaken me for someone he knew, and as I looked in his face I did not feel a bit afraid, although his face was strange enough, goodness knows. "What is your name?" he asked. "Jane Seymour," I replied, for it was my name, at least the name I went under.