This was more than, in my new
spirit of economy I desired to pay, but after exhausting my list I
was obliged to go back rather than sleep in the highroad. Mrs.
Hobbs offered to deduct two shillings a week if I stayed until
Christmas, and said she should not charge me a penny for the linen.
Thanking her with tears of gratitude, I requested dinner. There was
no meat in the house, so I supped frugally off two boiled eggs, a
stodgy household loaf, and a mug of ale, after which I climbed the
stairs, and retired to my feather-bed in a rather depressed frame of
mind.
Visions of Salemina and Francesca driving under the linden-trees in
Berlin flitted across my troubled reveries, with glimpses of Willie
Beresford and his mother at Aix-les-Bains. At this distance, and in
the dead of night, my sacrifice in coming here seemed fruitless.
Why did I not allow myself to drift for ever on that pleasant sea
which has been lapping me in sweet and indolent content these many
weeks? Of what use to labour, to struggle, to deny myself, for an
art to which I can never be more than the humblest handmaiden? I
felt like crying out, as did once a braver woman's soul than mine,
'Let me be weak! I have been seeming to be strong so many years!'
The woman and the artist in me have always struggled for the
mastery. So far the artist has triumphed, and now all at once the
woman is uppermost.
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