I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they had nor could have sympathy with anything in me.
I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully.
Presentiments are strange things: and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.
My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world – the … affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other.
