She felt her love as a misfortune; it was too strong and too unsatisfied to be felt in any sense as joy, though it strung her nature to a painful appreciation of joy.

She saw life with a cold, appraising eye; it was like a landscape robbed of all sunlight, and, so robbed, so bleak, and so bereft, it was easy to appraise it, to see, since one could have no warmth or light, what were the next best things to have.

She had missed the next best things again and again, when the moment had come for taking them; she had drawn back sick, blanched, shaken with the throes of desperate hope.

Only in these last years, when next best things were no longer so plentiful, had hope really died.

Her heart still beat, but it seemed to beat thinly, among all the heaped-up ashes of dead hopes.
She was free to go forth into the sunless world and choose what place should be hers.