"Now there are people who pass from drug to drug with increase of pleasure, but there are others to whom the notion of being drugged becomes suddenly obnoxious and in whom the reaction creates an abnormal activity. Quite suddenly I abandoned my pleasure and became ambitious to express myself in art. I succeeded. I was, for one who begins so late in life, exceptionally successful, and then behold, my very success took on the aspect of yielding to another sedative drug. It never seemed anything but a temporary expedient to defeat the claims of existence. Just as love had seemed a surrender to the exclusively feminine side of me, so art seemed a surrender to the exclusively masculine side. There was always an unsatisfied, unexpressed part of me that girded at the satisfied part. As a result of this, I made up my mind that a happy marriage with children and a household to look after was a better thing than artistic success. Here was obviously another experiment for the benefit of the feminine side. I knew perfectly well that if I had carried out my intention I should not have remained content when the sedative action of the new drug began to cease, and I am grateful now that circumstances interfered. I was jilted by the man who was going to marry me, and the fact that I had already lived with him and refused to marry him dozens of times made the injury to my pride intolerable. In a fit of rage I flung behind me everything--success, love, marriage, friends--and left England to take up again at the age of thirty-one a life I had forsaken for several years. And now I found that even the mere externals of such a life were horrible. I could not bear the idea of being for sale; while I had no intention of ever giving myself to a man again, I had to drink for my living and dance with drunkards for my cab fare, which, though it may not be a technical prostitution, differs only in degree from the complete sale of the body. "Scarcely a month had passed when I became seriously ill, and in the dreadful delirium of my fever I imagined that I was damned. I do not think that anybody has the right to accept seriously the mental revelations that are made to a mind beside itself; I think, indeed, it would be a blasphemy to accuse God of taking such a method to rouse a soul to a sense of its being, its duties, and its dangers; and I dread to claim for myself any supernatural intervention at such a time, partly because my reason shies at such a thought and partly because I think it is presumptuous to suppose that God should interest Himself so peculiarly in an individual. It seems to me almost vulgarly anthropomorphic." "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?" the priest murmured.