the glass on whether or not she is pretty, and resolves to ask some young man,
but prefers to think well of herself even if it is an illusion; constantly modulates
over into passionate prayer to God to grant all her wishes; is oppressed with
despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in God because she prayed Him
for a set of croquet and to help her to learn English, both of which He granted.
At church some prayers and services seem directly aimed at her; Paris now
seems a frightful desert, and she has no motive to avoid carelessness in her
appearance. She has freaky and very changeable ideas of arranging the things in
her room. When she hears of the duke's marriage she almost throws herself over
a bridge, prays God for pardon of her sins, and thinks all is ended; finds it
horrible to dissemble her feelings in public; goes through the torture of altering
her prayer about the duke. She is disgusted with common people, harrowed by
jealousy, envy, deceit and every hideous feeling, yet feels herself frozen in the
depth, and moving only on the surface. When her voice improves she welcomes
it with tears and feels an all-powerful queen. The man she loves should never
speak to another. Her journal she resolves to make the most instructive book that
ever was or ever will be written. She esteems herself so great a treasure that no
one is worthy of her; pities those who think they can please her; thinks herself a
real divinity; prays to the moon to show her in dreams her future husband, and
quarrels with her photographs.
In some moods she feels herself beautiful, knows she shall succeed, everything
smiles upon her and she is absolutely happy and yet in the next paragraph the
fever of life at high pressure palls upon her and things seem asleep and unreal.
Her attempts to express her feelings drive her to desperation because words are
inadequate. She loves to weep, gives up to despair to think of death, and finds
everything transcendently exquisite. She comes to despise men and wonder
whether the good are always stupid and the intelligent always false and saturated
with baseness, but on the whole believes that some time or other she is destined
to meet one true good and great man. Now she is inflated with pride of her
ancestry, her gifts, and would subordinate everybody and everything; she would
never speak a commonplace word, and then again feels that her life has been a
failure and she is destined to be always waiting. She falls on her knees sobbing,
praying to God with outstretched hands as if He were in her room; almost vows
to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem one-tenth of the way on foot; to devote her
money to good works; lacks the pleasures proper to her age; wonders if she can
ever love again. On throwing a bouquet from a window into a crowd in the
Corso a young man choked so beautifully a workman who caught it that by that
one act of strangling and snatching the bouquet she fell in love. The young man