Why had I not drawn her into my arms and kissed her till
all that soft delicate face was one flame of scarlet? Then a
contemptuous smile came with the answering thought. What use were
mere empty kisses if she gave me a thousand! This state of things
could not go on. The life that I led seemed growing more and more
unendurable week by week. It was a life of perpetual restraint, of
refusal to every wish, of denial to every desire that rose in me, in
which there was a bar laid upon every impulse, and an immovable
chain upon every tendency. I was ambitious, and I could get no
recognition. I was gifted, at least in my own estimation, and I
could force open no field for my gifts. I was in love, and there was
no means of attaining its object. Patience! patience! This was what
I had been saying to myself hour by hour for two years, but there
were times when it seemed that my brain, my whole system, was
collapsing in the nervous irritation, in the chafing and the
straining of this existence, which was filled with nothing but
successless work, continuous disappointment, and unsatisfied
desires.
Night succeeded night in which sleep was an impossibility, when my
head seemed light and turning as in delirium with the violence and
intensity of longing to shape my life differently. Could I have
obtained the fulfilment of one desire or of the other, the strength
of my nature would have flowed naturally into the channel opened
before it.
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