"Let them break my heart if they like," she had thought to herself, in the self-abasement of that bitter moment; "it will be no more than I have deserved." She locked her door and opened her writing-desk.

Knowing what she had to do, she tried to collect herself and do it.
The effort was in vain.

Those persons who study writing as an art are probably the only persons who can measure the vast distance which separates a conception as it exists in the mind from the reduction of that conception to form and shape in words.

The heavy stress of agitation that had been laid on Mercy for hours together had utterly unfitted her for the delicate and difficult process of arranging the events of a narrative in their due sequence and their due proportion toward each other.

Again and again she tried to begin her letter, and again and again she was baffled by the same hopeless confusion of ideas.
She gave up the struggle in despair.
A sense of sinking at her heart, a weight of hysterical oppression on her bosom, warned her not to leave herself unoccupied, a prey to morbid self-investigation and imaginary alarms.
She turned instinctively, for a temporary employment of some kind, to the consideration of her own future.