"...............Worse than despair, Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope. It is the only ill which can find place Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost, That it should spare the eldest flower of spring; Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch Even now a city stands, strong, fair and free, Now stench and blackness yawns like death. Oh! plead With famine and wind-walking pestilence, Blind lightning, or the deep sea; not with man-- Cruel, cold formal man--righteous in words, In deeds a Cain." She sits down before her looking-glass, and stares desperately, with inner eyes, at the blank ruin of her life; with outer eyes at the ruin mirrored in her sunken, altered face, that the old looking-glass, blurred with rust stains, makes look more sunken and altered still. Involuntarily she lifts her thumb and forefinger, and lays them in the hollows of her cheek, as if seeking for the red carnations that used to flower so fairly there. She has noticed before the decay of her beauty--noticed it with apathy, as who should say, "Everything else is gone, why should not this go too?" But now she observes it with a sick pang, as at the parting with a friend; she would give ten years of her life to reach it back again. "It was only for my beauty he liked me," she says, still speaking aloud; "it was only for my beauty that anybody could like me; there is nothing else to like in me. I never was clever, or said witty things, or sang, or played: I was only pretty. Now that that is gone, everything is gone!" As one shipwrecked, floating about on a plank among the weltering waves of some great plunging, grey-green sea, strains his eyes along the horizon to see some sail-speck, some misty palm-island, that looks as though it were hung midway in air; so she strains her mental eyes to catch sight of some friendly ship that may take her off from this rock of her despair. This world is full of pairs, but some oversight has left a good many odd ones also; Esther is an odd one. Her road has come to a blank wall, and there stopped. Is there no ladder that can overclimb this wall?--no gap in all the thickness of its brick-and-mortar?--no outlet?