Page:The story of Mary MacLane (IA storyofmarymacla00macliala).pdf/213

 I was seventeen it was even more lonely, and everything was still harder to understand.

And again I said—faintly—everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been—and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.

For I know that it will not be different.

I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.

It is very, very lonely.

It is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick.

It is more than I can bear.

Why—why was I ever born!

I can not live, and I can not die—for