This figure constantly floated before her, no matter how hard she might try to turn her attention upon other things. And although in the work of the artist nothing was finished but the head, her fancy saw the finished statue, and, for the first time in her life, she looked upon her own beauty, in her thoughts, with other eyes than her own, which could find nothing new or especial in it. The cruel lot that had held her apart from life in her girlish years, and the early experiences that had given her a contemptuous, if not a hostile opinion of men, had kept her mind isolated from all those feelings that usually agitate a girl's soul in its spring-time. It had never occurred to her to look at herself, as it were, through the eyes of a man, for she had never known one for whose sake she would have thought it worth while to give herself so much trouble. When she observed her face in the mirror, and could not help finding it beautiful, it afforded her just as little pleasure as if--like a female Robinson Crusoe on some island in the ocean--she had seen her reflection in clear water, and had known by it that she was queen of the wilderness. In the next room sat the poor madwoman, in her arm-chair, and nodded at the beautiful daughter, whom she was robbing of life, with an idiotic smile. Of what avail was her beauty against this inexorable fate? Sometimes indeed, in the spring nights, between dreaming and waking, or when she read some beautiful moving story, it seemed to her as if the frost that had settled about her heart were bursting, as if a secret longing for something sweet and precious swelled her bosom, a trembling desire for some unknown, unattainable happiness. But this feeling never took the shape of a being who should strive to gain her love, and whom she might love in return. At such times she dreamed of nothing better than to have the liberty of belonging to herself, of being freed from that horrible duty which, to be sure, had grown less hard through custom, and which no longer awakened even a shudder, but which held her a prisoner daily and hourly. If these chains only fell from her--would she then be so unwise as to voluntarily submit herself to a new form of restraint?