She went quickly along the stony streets and climbed up the grassy side of the rampart.

It was all still and solitary, and she sat down where there lay before her a wide stretch of perfectly level country, only broken by the lines of the old fortifications, and bordered by the sea.

In the clear morning sunshine, she could distinguish the white foam where the waves broke against the wooden pier, and out on the blue waters there were white shining specks of sails.

Ships coming and going, and on the beach moving groups of people--everywhere something that had life and motion and looked on to a future, an object beyond this present moment--everywhere but here with her.
"Oh," she said to herself, "how wearisome life is! What good to myself or to anybody else is this existence of mine?
Am I never either to be good or happy again?
Happy, I suppose that does not so much matter--but good?
If people are wrong once, can they never get right again?
I used to think I should like to be a Sister of Mercy--and now that is all that is left for me, I do not feel any inclination for it.

I don't think I have a vocation even for that." And at this point she fell into a lower depth of melancholy--one of those sad moods which, at eighteen, have even a kind of charm in their exaggeration..