It did not quite apply to Henrietta, for she was not sporting and jesting downstairs with anyone, but that verse was the greatest comfort to her of those dreary years. The writer _must_ have been through it all, she thought; she knows what it is. Not to be alone, to have someone, though an unknown one, who could share it, lightened her burden, when she was in a mood that it should be lightened. She made up verses too, and wrote them in a pretty album she bought for the purpose. They relieved her heart a little--at any rate it was a distraction to think of the rhymes. She would have shown them to Carrie, if she had had the slightest encouragement, but as Carrie gave no encouragement, there was no one to see them. "While Nature op'ed her lavish hand And fairest flowers displayed, 'Twas his to taste of sunny joys, 'Twas mine to sit in shade. "Oh, talk not to me of a lasting devotion! It shrivels, it ceases, it fades and it dies. In the heart of a man 'tis a fleeting emotion; Alas, in a woman eternal it lies!" A poet would have said that anyone capable of writing that was incapable of feeling, but he would have been wrong. Sometimes Henrietta used to have a phantom lover like the phantom friend of her childhood, but now--had she more or less imagination as a child?--she could not bear it. She imagined the phantom, and then she wanted him so intensely that she had to forget him. The aspect of certain days would be connected with some peculiarly mournful moments. She wondered which was the most depressing, the dark setting in at four o'clock and leaving her seven hours of drawing-room fancy work (for it disturbed her mother if she went to bed before eleven), or the summer sun that would not go down. If only some kind stroke of misfortune had taken away all Mr. Symons' money. Disagreeable poverty would have been a great comfort to her. She would have been forced to make an effort; not to brood and concentrate herself on her misery. But Mr. Symons, on the contrary, continued to get richer, and throughout her fairly long, dull life, Henrietta was always cursed with her tidy little income.